Whatever product, service or personal reason you have started to blog, it all starts at one point. Great content. Without great content, it’s hard to stand out from the crowd. This is especially true with business blogging.
Here at Startup Active, we believe that blogging can massively increase your brand awareness, online, and help bring in potential leads.
Here are a few reasons why you should turn your blog into a platform that helps bring potential clients to your website.
It helps drive traffic to your website.
Every business wants more visitors to their website. It’s common sense, right? But how are people actually finding your website? They could type your business name right into Google, but that’s an audience you already have. They know who you are and what your company does. You’re on their radar, as such, and that doesn’t help you get more traffic.
You could pay for traffic by buying an email list, hitting them with a newsletter, and hoping some people open and click through on the emails. But that’s expensive, and, you know, illegal. You could pay for traffic by placing paid search ads (PPC), which isn’t illegal, however, still quite costly. Plus, once the money runs out, your traffic stops coming, too.
So… how can you drive in traffic? It’s simple: blogging, social media, and search engines. Here’s how it works.
Think about how many pages there are on your website – most likely it won’t be millions. Then think about how often you update those webpages. Probably not that often, right? People don’t tend to update an ‘about us’ page that often.
Well, blogging helps solve both of those problems.
Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website. It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published that they should surface. Every new indexed page is one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines, and drive traffic to your website through organic search.
Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that people can share on social networks -Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ – which helps get your business exposed to a new audience that may not know you yet.
Blog posts also helps keep your social media presence going too – instead of asking your social media manager to come up with brand new original content for social media (or creating that content yourself), your blog can serve as the repository of content. You’re strengthening your social exposure with blog content and driving new website visitors to your blog via your social channels.
So, the first benefit of blogging? It helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that.
It helps establish authority.
The best business blogs answer common questions their clients and potential clients may have. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes. This is a extremely helpful for sales and service.
Can you imagine the impact of sending an educational blog post that will help to clear things up for a confused customer? Establishing authority is certainly not as concrete as traffic and leads, but it’s pretty compelling to say the least.
It drives long-term results.
One of the best things about blogging is it helps drive traffic to your website and potentially generate leads while you’re on holiday, spending time with the family and even while you’re snoozing!
For example, let’s say you sit down for an hour where you write and publish a blog post today. And that blog post gets you 100 views and 10 leads. You get another 50 views and 5 leads tomorrow as a few more people find it on social media and some of your subscribers get caught up on their email and RSS.
But that’s not the end.
That blog post is now ranking in search engines. That means for days, weeks, months, and even years to come; you can continue to get traffic and leads from that blog post. So while you’re sunning it up in Florida, picking up your children from school, or catching up on The Walking Dead, you’re also driving traffic and leads. One hour of effort today can turn into hundreds of thousands of views and leads in the future.
If you’re looking to start a blog that gets business or gets more investment, the reasons above can be used as a great platform to start this.
Have you begun business blogging? Looking to start? Share your thoughts and questions on business blogging below and what you’re looking to get out of it.
