Top 5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Blog
Think about the last time you Googled a question and found an answer. Where did you find your answer? I’d bet it was from someone’s blog! Businesses of all shapes and sizes have blogs that help millions of people every day answer their questions and explore new products.
There’s no better time to begin your content creation journey than today. Start building your brand, increasing engagement, boosting sales, and so much more…all with a blog. Have I sold you yet? Well, if not, keep reading for the 5 reasons why your business needs a blog.
Increase traffic to your website.
Think about how people find your website. Your existing customers will probably just search your business name and you’ll pop up. You can always pay for search engine ads, but this is a costly route to go down. So what can you do to boost website traffic without a big expenditure?
A fantastic (and super affordable) way to achieve this is a blog! A well-crafted blog will help boost your search engine optimization (SEO), therefore attracting new people to your site. We’ll talk a bit more about SEO in a bit, but here’s a simplified rundown of how a blog can benefit your SEO:
How often do you update the main pages of your website (like your homepage)?. I’d bet you don’t make a lot of changes to these pages very often. The problem is that when it comes to SEO, search engines like Google like to see an active website that’s always updating its pages with relevant content.
Now how does a blog help with SEO? Well, every time you post a new blog, that’s a brand new indexed page added to your site. Each blog is an opportunity for your site to pop up on the search results page (like the front page of Google), and reach more people organically. Frequent blog posting is a cue for search engines signaling that they should be constantly checking your site for new content. So, it’s important to be posting new content consistently!
Establish yourself as an expert in your field.
A blog is a great way to demonstrate your extensive knowledge of your industry and show you’re an expert in your field. There are so many ways to showcase your knowledge. You can write about changes in your industry, news or happenings, and company updates. You want to establish yourself as the go-to for info about whatever you specialize in.
It’s all about providing helpful and educational information to your customers. Use how-to guides, case studies, and FAQs to create a massive bank of knowledge about your offerings and industry. This not only helps increase understanding of the topic at hand but also provides insight about how your offering can be relevant to their needs – without coming off too sales pitchy. If you aren’t able (or aren’t willing) to educate your audience, they might not consider your content or offerings the next time around.
It’s so important to strive to teach your audience what you know. Don’t gatekeep your industry! If you know it, you should share it. Taking a “helping first” approach to crafting your blogs will signify that you’re genuine and a trusted professional. Always sharing expert information will increase trust, referrals, and loyal readers.
Repurpose blog content for other marketing areas.
A blog isn’t a one-and-done sort of deal. When you create valuable and helpful content, you should take advantage of it and not let it sit stagnantly. You can repurpose blog content for many different marketing areas to increase engagement, create cohesive brand messaging, and enhance your marketing strategy.
Utilize blog content for your social media, email campaigns, podcasts, and video content. (This isn’t an all-inclusive list but just a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing.) For socials, pull some insightful thought leadership quotes to post. On LinkedIn and Facebook, be sure to link directly to the blog so people can click to read more if they want. In emails, make sure to give an enticing summary of your new blog and link to it. This could be as simple as “Read more to learn about XYZ.”
Linking to your blog serves as a call-to-action to your audience and will drive more traffic to your website. Once you’ve got someone on your site, they’ll likely peruse the rest of your site. They may make a purchase or share your blog with others. The more engaging and valuable your blog content is, the more time they’ll spend on your site. Hint, hint…longer dwell time is also great for boosting SEO!
Once you write a blog, don’t let it just sit there! Its content can be used to fuel your other marketing channels, creating a more integrated marketing messaging. As you continue to write new blogs, you’ll always have fresh content to reference and drive your marketing strategy.
Creates long-term value for you AND your readers.
Even if you don’t repurpose your blog content right away, it can still be a great source of long-term value. Your blog is now on your site to be discovered weeks, months – dare I say years – from now.
It’s one of those marketing tools that’ll be providing value while you sleep with no extra work on your end. It’s important to remember that optimizing your blog is a vital step before kicking up your feet and watching your traffic increase. But, I diverge.
We’re human and most of us aren’t around 24/7 to answer customer questions. Your blog serves as a resource bank for people who need answers no matter the time of day, making your site a credible source for their future questions. Include call-to-actions to your offerings within your blog content to drive sales without needing to lift a finger.
You can also make money while you sleep by monetizing your blogs using affiliate links. Affiliate marketing is a great way to generate an income just from writing blogs and referring your readers to related products and services. There are a wide variety of affiliate programs, so be sure to find the right one for your business.
Traffic to your blogs will continue to grow over time, so don’t expect this to be immediate. It’s actually been found that older blog posts may drive more traffic to your site than newer ones. These older posts are called compounding posts where their traffic increases over time and creates a larger marketing impact over time.
Don’t be discouraged if your blog posts aren’t performing like you want them to right away. As long as you’re creating content with the intent to educate and provide value, you’ll gain that traffic over time.
Boosts your SEO.
Blogs can help you rank better on search engines. There are a few big ways that a blog can help boost your SEO:
Ranks your site for related keywords.
Keywords are essentially the idea or topic that your blog content is about. You want to make sure you’re using the right keywords so you’re popping up in the correct, most relevant searches. You don’t need to stuff your posts with keywords just because you feel you should. Using well-placed and relevant keywords is a much better strategy to get your site rank to soar.
More content for search engines to crawl.
I won’t get into the technicalities of how search engine crawlers work, but this is an important concept to know of. The more updated content you have on your site, the more relevant search engines will find it. Blogs are a great place to provide rich content to increase your ranking on search engines.Helps with internal linking.
Internal linking is when you add links to your other content within your blogs. This helps improve site navigation and passes authority from one page to another, increasing the credibility of your site. The more relevant links you provide within your content, the better your SEO will be and, therefore, the more traffic you’ll get to your site.
Helps with inbound/backlink building.
Creating helpful and useful content is very important for backlinks. If another site finds your content to be relevant to their blog, they’ll link back to your blog. When other websites link to your content, it’s a cue to search engines that your content is relevant and valuable to searchers. It also helps build your domain authority which can improve your discoverability in search engines.
Phew! I know that was a lot to digest. So, I’ll just leave you with this piece of advice: if you don’t already have a blog, look into starting one! If your current blog is outdated or isn’t being used as best as it could be, this is a great time to look at revamping it. Good thing I know someone whose specialty is just that! Contact me for how I can help you start a blog or give your existing blog a facelift.
