Many brick and mortar businesses as well as online stores have a blog. In fact, it is a popular way for many businesses to engage their customers. However, many businesses are still wondering if they need a blog for their business and if it’s worth their time.
Basically, a business blog is a marketing tactic used to help your business gain more visibility. It is different from regular blogging because content for business blogs are about a particular subject matter related to the business.
Now that we know what business blogging is let’s move on to why you should use this as a marketing tactic.
Drives Traffic
According to recent surveys there are over 1 billion websites on the internet today and all of them want traffic. So how do you get attention? You can:
- Have people type your address on their search engine but this is for people who already know that you exist.
- Pay for traffic through buying an email list blast them and hope that some of them click your link. However, this is expensive and illegal.
- Pay for traffic by placing tons of ads. This isn’t illegal but very expensive though.
So how can you get traffic? Through:
- Blogging
- Social media presence
- Search engines
Here’s how it works.
Think about how many pages your website has – your probably have a lot – then think about how many times you update them – probably not very often. Blogging helps you solve this problem.
Every time you upload a blog post, it is indexed on your website giving you the opportunity to show up on search engines which in turn drives traffic through organic search. It’s like a cue for Google and other search engines to index your to see if new content surfaces.
It also helps you get discovered through social media. Every blog post you write can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media networks. This makes it easier for your business to be discovered by new people.
Blogging is a good way to keep your social media presence strong. Instead of having your or your social media manager come up with new content, your blog can serve as a repository of content. Blogging can expand social media reach and drive traffic to your website.
Convert Traffic To Leads
Now that you have traffic coming in to your site, you want to convert it into leads. You can do this by adding lead generating call-to-action (CTA) to your posts.
Most of the time these CTA lead to free ebooks, fact sheets, webinars, trials and other content asset where someone would be willing to exchange their information.
If you’re unfamiliar with traffic-to-lead conversions, it works like this:
- Visitor comes to your website.
- Sees your CTA and clicks.
- Gets into a landing page where there is a form to fill-up with their information.
- Visitor submits their info.
- Gets freebies.
According to research approximately 99% of blog posts have CTA. This is how blogs turn traffic into leads for your sales team.
Establishes Authority
A good business blog answers questions their leads and customers pose. If you are consistently posting content that is helpful to your audience, it will establish you as an authority in their eyes. Just imagine the impact of an educational blog on a confused customer. How many more deals can a salesperson close if their customer discovered a blog they had written?
Establishing content is not a metric that can be established like traffic and leads. However, it is just as powerful because it enables sales. This is what business blogging is all about: enabling opportunities to convert.
Drives Long-Term Results
Blogging drives long-term results through the search engines.
Let’s say that you created and published a blog post today and the post garnered 100 views and 10 leads. The next day you get another 50 views and 5 leads and a few more on social media. After the fanfare has died down you got 150 views and 15 leads. Not bad.
But it doesn’t stop there.
That blog post is now ranking on search engines and will rank for days and even months and years to come. You can continue to get traffic and leads through that post. So while it may feel like an ordinary post to you, in reality it looks like this:
This means that your blog post is continuing to generate traffic and leads even if you’re sleeping, on vacation or taking care of other business matters. Blogging can greatly affect the scalability of your business. While you might not see immediate results, a blog can continue to generate traffic and leads without additional investment.
