Why Keeping a Blog Is a Smart Business Strategy

You are no stranger to blogging. Even if you don’t actually keep a blog yourself or post a regular blog on your business’s website, you have surely heard about blogging and are familiar with its popularity. But what you might not be familiar with is exactly why blogging is such a smart online business strategy. You may not know how it can attract customers, and ultimately, improve your profit margins. The following six points deal with why keeping a blog is a sound business practice, and why you might want to re-think your current online marketing tactics.

1. A Blog Drives Traffic to Your Website

More people use the Internet to find businesses in today’s world than ever before. A 2014 survey found that 94 percent of B2B buyers report that they
conduct some form of online research before purchasing a business product
But just how do customers search online? Unless a potential client is actually typing your business’s name into a search engine, one of the easiest ways to get your business’s website to the top of the search results page (a component of SEO) is to keep a blog. Every time you write a new blog, you’re adding another indexed page to your website. What this means is that you are creating yet another opportunity for a search engine – like Google – to place you higher on its search results page, because your website is both active and relevant. For example, if you manage a law firm, your law firm’s website probably isn’t getting updated much – the “About Us” and “Services” pages likely remain inactive. But if you start adding blogs – like “What to Do if You Get a DUI,” or “The Penalties for Drinking and Driving” – then when a user searches for these topics online, your website has something pertinent to offer them.

2. A Blog Personifies Your Brand

Your website will help a lot with attracting potential customers to your brand name, but it’s not even close to the kind of impact that a blog can have in terms of humanizing or personifying your company to the reader. Because your blogs are free to touch upon anything at all which might be of interest and have relevance to a targeted audience, they have much greater freedom and flexibility than the content on your website could ever hope to have. And you wouldn’t be changing the content on your website anywhere near as often as you can post blogs with fresh, relevant information. Blogs can also be used to keep readers abreast of developments within the company, such as personnel changes or new product releases, and all these are ways of putting a face to your business instead of giant corporate complex or even a name. It can help to establish a kind of bond with readers, and that bond can lead to trust and loyalty – exactly the objective of good branding.

3. A Blog Establishes Your Company as an Authority

When you make regular blog posts, you begin to establish your company as an authority in your industry, and in the minds of your readers. As long as you can keep your content interesting and relevant, and of course, accurate and well-researched, it begins to position your company as one of the foremost speakers on subjects associated with your market. Every post need not be a revelation about deep and relatively unknown concepts – you can simply relate information about industry events and developments, which has the effect of making you seem to be in-the-know, and a source of useful data. With this kind of positive authority equity building in the minds of your audience, they will very often begin to transfer that respect and loyalty to your company in the form of sales as well.

4. Blogging Effectively Generates Inbound Links

In-bound links are one of the three great pillars of SEO, and without a blog, it’s very difficult to generate inbound links, which Google favors highly in its search ranking algorithms. By posting fresh blogs which are used as resources by other bloggers and the media, you begin to accumulate in-bound links, because your blogs are being cited as reference material by many other professionals – and all of this lends credence to you and your blogs as being highly influential. The added bonus of these inbound links is that they also generate a good amount of referral traffic back to your website. The combined positive effect of inbound links is just something you can’t afford to overlook by ignoring the power of great content in your blog posts.
 
 

5. Blogs = Traffic = Leads (= Sales)

Okay, you now understand how a blog drives traffic to your website. However, the ultimate goal is not just to drive traffic, but to drive targeted traffic that turns into a lead (and then into a sale). To help with this, you need to include a call-to-action (CTA) within your company’s blog. The call-to-action is a request/command for the blog’s visitor to take some type of action. Keeping with the same theme above, a lawyer’s blog may include a CTA for a visitor to their website to fill out a form to request a free case consultation. Other CTA’s might include clicking a button to sign up for monthly emails; to share the blog post on a social media site; to buy a product; to download a free e-book; to get a coupon, or to live chat with a service professional. The CTA that you choose should be relevant to your business. Once the user has taken the action, they are transformed from a visitor into a lead. You then have the power to follow up with them (by sending them an email, providing them with a free consultation, giving them a coupon, etc.), which will hopefully lead to a sale.

6. Blogging Is Cost Effective

Finally, blogging is one of the most cost-effective online marketing strategies that a business can employ. The return on investment (ROI) is large, especially if you keep the blogging in-house, which many professionals choose to do. Rather than spending your money on paid advertisement, writing can – and often is – a completely free way to advertise just how great your business really is.

Okay – You’ve Convinced Me, But…

If you simply don’t have the time or are struggling to generate quality content like branded images and copy write, don’t fret! Tenth Muse does this kind of thing all the time! We can help with your online business strategy, we perform your keyword research, draft your copy, design and brand your images and optimize your blog for search engine visibility with your niche market. We wrap all of these services into a package and remind you when we need concepts and reviews. Even better, we can do this as often as you need to keep your site growing with top notch content!

Get Help With Your BLOG

Blog strategies are important to your business’s success, and the best of websites take hard work and skill. If you need a little help getting your business’s website off the ground, Contact our team at Tenth Muse today.