How Blogging Benefits Business

You might be surprised at how many times we discuss a website or marketing strategies with a client and they don’t want a blog. A lot of people see it as a an annoying hinderance that will only slow down their ability to generate revenue. We’ll have to say this many times again after this article, but blogging benefits your business.

1. Blogging Drives Website Traffic

Do you want more visitors to your website? Yeah, we all do.

What are the ways that people can find your website?

• Directly entering your website into their browser is one way. If someone’s doing that then they’re part of your existing audience. They know you are and what you do. This way doesn’t help you get more traffic.
• You could buy an email list. DON’T! If you ignore that warning, then blast out those emails and hope they see your email and decide you’re worth a click and a few seconds. The few visitors you get will have been expensive and oh yeah, it’s illegal.
• You could pay for more ads and get more traffic that way. It will become very costly as you keep increasing your ad presence. If you hit your budget limit, your traffic will stop.

So how else can you do it? Easy! Blogging, social media, and search engines.

How many pages do you have on your website? You probably don’t have a lot, maybe you even have a one page website. Almost certainly most, if not all of those pages are rarely updated. How often can you update your About Us and Contact page?

Enter blogging to save the day.

Every time you post a blog entry, that is one more page of your website to be indexed by search engines. The more pages you have indexed by search engines you will have more opportunities to generate leads by driving visitor traffic to your website. Besides the SEO benefits that we’ll look at, blogging signals to search engines that your site is alive and active, and they should be crawling your site more frequently to find updates.

Blogging also helps extend your brand’s reach into social media. Blog entries can be shared by other people on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest. Other people sharing your content helps your business to reach new audiences.

You can also use blog content to drive your social media. Instead of struggling to create new topics for every post, you can instead generate content from your blog articles. You’ll strengthen your social reach by using your blog content and will be driving new visitors to your website.

To sum up the first reason blogging benefits business: Blogging helps to drive new traffic to your website through search engine indexing and a symbiotic relationship with social media.

2. Supports Converting Traffic Into Leads

Traffic is great, but what’s even better is when your website is converting traffic into sales leads.

Each post is not only a new page for search engines to index, but it’s also a new page for engaging your audience and converting a visitor into a lead. How can you convert a visitor into a lead? Easy, add a lead generating call to action in each published post.

Often the calls to action ore things like free ebooks, fact sheets, white papers, or free trials. Basically anything that someone would be willing to exchange information to access. If tings are a still a bit cloudy, it’s as simple as this:

• Person visits your website
• Visitor sees call to action for free offer
• Visitor clicks call to action and is directed to landing page that contains a form they need to complete.
• Customer completes form, submits form, and then receives free offer.

Not every reader of your blog will become a lead, and that’s fine. 100% conversion rates don’t exist. Just get blogging, measure your performance, and then try to improve each month.

3. Blogging Helps to Establish Authority

The best business blogs strive to answer the questions of their leads and customers. If you consistently create content that is helpful to others, it’ll help you establish yourself as an authority for your target audience.

Imagine the impact of sending the link to a blog article on your website to help answer a question. Or maybe your salespeople can close more leads by sharing blog content written by that particular salesperson?

“Authority” is an airy metric. It’s not measurable like traffic or views, but authority still has some power to influence. If you don’t like the term or perception of “authority”, instead refer to it as “sales enablement”. Blogging presents these sales enablement opportunities:

• If people are able to use your blog to answer questions, they are likely going to enter into a sales process with greater trust because you’ve already helped them.
• Prospects who have been reading your blog will likely have a better understanding of your business and what you have to offer. This means conversations can instantly be more productive.
• Salespeople who encounter questions can turn to your blog as a knowledge repository. This will help move the process along more swiftly and int he mind of the prospect, the salesperson becomes a helpful resource.

4. Drive Long-Term Results

Wouldn’t it be cool to drive traffic to your website and generate new leads by taking a trip to Fiji, hitting the gym, or taking an afternoon nap?

Blogging kind of does that. Wait. Hear me out.

You sit down for an hour and put together and publish a new blog. Maybe that blog gets 90 views and you generate 9 leads. Then the next day you get another 50 views and 5 leads because a few subscribers got caught up on their emails and RSS updates. After a few days the traffic has died down but another 3 or 4 days pass and you’ve got another 120 views and 12 new leads.

But wait, there’s more!

That same blog post has been indexed and is now ranking in search engines. For days, months, and even for years to come that same bog post will continue to generate website traffic and leads.

So while you’re relaxing on a Fijian beach, getting in your laps, or passing out while watching a movie; your still generating traffic and leads.

Depending on your business model, you might even be able to monetize your blog through affiliate programs or sponsored content.

Remember that most of your sales will come from your older posts. For this reason you should ensure you have “evergreen” content. Evergreen content increases the likelihood that you’ll benefit from “compounding posts”. Compounding posts continue to generate leads and sales for years after they’ve been posted because they’re still relevant.

Blogging is scalable. While you might not instantly see the blogging benefits in your results, over time you’ll be able to count on a reliable amount of traffic without any additional investment.

Secondary Blogging Benefits

There are other reasons businesses might want to blog, but they are of lesser benefit and can digress from the greater business blogging benefits.

Blogs can be used to test out campaigns before there’s significant investment. They can also help you understand personas better. Your own and those of your audience. Blogs are also excellent outlets for PR communications like event announcements and new product releases. It’s definitely easier to use your own platform and get the message directly out to your audience without relying on journalists and hoping your release gets published.

All of those are great benefits, but are really secondary.

Are you trying to create a blog for your business? All of the information is great support for an argument as to why your business should be blogging. Without a blog your company is missing out on cheap and easy blogging benefits to your company.

Let’s Talk About Your Brand

shane@3catslabs.com | Call +65-3159-4231

Contact 3 Cats Labs

Share