Most business owners have heard companies that blog get up to 55% more visitors to their websites than businesses who do not. Regardless of whether your business is business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), blogging can greatly increase the amount of leads you acquire every month by an average of almost 70%. However, even with the overwhelming statistics, you may be asking yourself “Will it really work for ME?” Read on to find out the answer.
What Exactly is Business Blogging?
In a nutshell, business blogging is a marketing tactic. It uses blogging to give your business more visibility on the Internet.
A blog is a part of a website where you post short form content, or articles that your customers may want to read, and blogging is the act of creating that content. It is important to remember when you are business blogging that your posts contain subject matter that relates to your business. For example; if you are in the pet food business, ensure that your blog posts are about pets, and not the latest and greatest cars.
What is Online Visibility?
Online visibility is simply the ability to be found and seen on the Internet. This could mean that your business shows up on the first page of search engines, is posted about frequently on social media websites and is mentioned on other people's blogs.
Essentially, business blogging is one of the ways you can get your business noticed by people using the Internet who are looking for the services or products that you offer.
What is the Difference Between Business Blogging and Regular blogging?
Hundreds of Internet users have personal blogs; many even have blogs that they earn an income on through the sales of ad space. However, business blogging is different because a business blog is not a hobby as many personal blogs are, nor is it the primary source of income for your business. Instead, a business blog is one of many marketing channels that help to support the growth of your business by driving traffic to your website. Nevertheless, a good business blog does not only achieve online visibility, it also converts some of that traffic in a way that benefits your business. Depending on the business and the type of blog, it may turn some traffic into leads for your sales team, or it may turn the traffic into customers via an online sale.
Four Great Reasons Why Businesses Should Blog
1. It Helps Bring Traffic to your Website
As explained earlier, a business blog should increase your online visibility by driving traffic to your website. In fact, a website with no visitors is useless and a waste of time and money. Of course, you could hope that people simply type in your URL, but the chances of that happening are quite slim. However, there are many ways to ensure that people see your website and one of the main ways is to make sure your site can be found through search engines.
Did you know that the more pages a website has the more chances it has of ranking in search engines? However, it is not a good idea to publish random pages in order to obtain a better ranking. Your website would quickly become messy and be difficult for users and customers to navigate. Business blogging is one way to create a multiple page website without the confusion or mess. This is because every time you publish a new blog post on your site you essentially have a new page, all conveniently located under your blog so that your website stays neat and clean. Meaning that every time you create a new blog post, you are also creating another opportunity for your website to rank in search engines and show up when people type in an appropriate query.
This logic also works in many other ways. For example, whenever you publish a new blog post, you are creating another opportunity for someone to share it on social media websites and for other websites to link to your post.
2. It Helps Convert Traffic into Customers and Leads
Every blog post is an opportunity to generate new leads and customers. To generate leads, you simply need to add a call to action to the post. This can be a free white paper, eBook, webinar, fact sheet or trial. In fact, it can be anything that someone will find useful and therefor are willing to exchange their information for. If you want to generate customers, make sure your blog posts are related to the things that you sell, and include a few links to relevant product pages.
Remember that not every visitor will become a lead or a customer. No business can convert all of their visitors, and that is ok. Just make sure that you set a goal for yourself and make every effort to better it every month.
3. It Helps to Establish Authority
Many of the best business blogs include copy that answers general questions that their customers and leads may have. This is because content that is helpful to the reader helps to establish the business as an authority. This is extremely useful for both sales and services. While this may not be as important as traffic, leads and customers, it is still quite powerful as people are more inclined to purchase a product or service from a company that they believe knows what they are doing.
4. It Delivers Long-Term Results
Spending a little time each week writing a blog post can help you generate traffic, leads and customers for a long time. For example; if you spend an hour writing a blog post and publish it in the morning, and that post gets 200 views and 20 leads on the first day, it could get another 100 views and 5 leads tomorrow. As more people read, and share your post, others could find it on social media sites which generates more leads and traffic. As subscribers read their RSS feeds and emails, you will get more traffic, leads and customers. Of course, as the post ages, and new posts are added, it will receive less views, but by then you will have netted numerous views, leads and customers from a single post.
But it's not finished: Your blog post should now be ranking in search engines, which means that it will continue to bring traffic to your website for months, even years to come. An hour's worth of work can literally turn into thousands of views, leads and customers over time. Which is why creating a business blog is so important.
Need Help Setting up Your Own Company Blog?
We realize that not all business owners have the time to maintain their own blogs no matter how much business they can generate. They do take time and dedication in order to post consistent and engaging information that your customers will love.
If you are interested in having a blog for your business but are not sure how to go about it or what to write….or you simply what to outsource it a professional then please give us a call today.
