Does your business have a blog? If not, you are squandering a huge opportunity to grow your business and reach a wider audience.
Many businesses understand the value of having a blog for their business but others are hesitant, worried it may be too time-consuming.
Although maintaining a blog page requires a time commitment, the positives far outweigh the negatives. In fact, 60% of people said they purchased a product after originally reading about it in a blog post.
In a very crowded marketplace, a blog helps you build brand awareness and stand out among your competitors. This article outlines the benefits of having a blog for your business.
1. Keeps Your Audience Engaged
Engaging with your audience is essential in online marketing today. Customers want authenticity from the businesses they interact with.
Having a blog is not enough. You need to consistently provide your target audience with compelling, relevant and valuable content. Make sure your content aligns with your business goals. If your blog is compelling, your audience will keep coming back to see your latest post.
A blog also enables you to speak directly to your current and prospective customers and connect with them in a different, more personal way. Establish a comments section for your blog. Monitor the comments and respond directly to your audience. By showing your audience you are interested and care about what they think, you are helping to foster a strong relationship with them as well as build trust.
2. Increases Website Traffic
Having a blog page for your business will increase traffic to your business’s website by helping you attract new visitors. You direct your audience to relevant pages on your website through links in your posts and your blog’s navigation.
As seen below through an online kitchen and bath renovator, Hausera; their blog provides their audience with different categories to choose from including insights, guides, and even the latest trends in kitchen and bath styles.
When you offer your audience a variety of different resources, they will more likely remain interested and will keep up with your latest posts.
A blog also assists in improving your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. The higher your website appears on search engine result pages the more traffic is driven to your website.
Search engines reward new content, using relevant keywords and meeting the needs of searchers. With a blog, you can consistently create fresh content to boost your ranking on search engines.
Another website traffic booster is shared content. If your audience finds your blog content relevant and engaging, they are more likely to share it on their social media channels. By adding social media share buttons on your blog, it makes it easier for your readers to share your content with their connections.
3. Builds Credibility
An authentic brand voice online is important for building trust and credibility with your target audience. By providing your target audience with useful and worthwhile content on your blog, you build your business’s online reputation as an industry thought-leader and expert in your niche market.
The more relevant and useful content you share with your audience, the more they will trust you to help them grow their business and help solve their challenges. As trust builds, your prospects and leads will become loyal customers.
4. Integrate with Social Media
Blog posts combined with social media are a great way to promote your business and keep your blog and social media channels up-to-date and balanced. Adding a link to your social media platforms in which your audience can be directed to your blog.
When you are running out of social media content ideas, your blog can provide you with enough content for multiple posts. You can repurpose your blog content by posting statistics relevant quotes or graphics from your blog articles.
5. Helps Generate Leads
Businesses with a blog generate 67% more leads than businesses who don’t. Blogs create more opportunities for generating leads by offering relevant information to your audience. You can include a call-to-action in your blog content and direct your readers to download a free ebook or something else of value.
Pro tip from Jeff Arnett; CEO of Arnett Credentials; an event security manufacturing company,
“People rely heavily on recommendations from others when selecting a product or service. Including client testimonials in your blog posts can encourage your audience to do business with you”.
Another way to generate leads from your blog is to partner with a charity or local nonprofit organization. People like to do business with a company giving back to the community or causes they are interested in.
Summary
Starting a business blog and keeping it updated consistently may seem like an overwhelming endeavor; however, as you can see from this article, having a business blog offers many important benefits for growing your business. Although a blog requires time and commitment, the rewards for your business – more website visitors, generate leads and sales – make the effort worthwhile.
About the author: Karina Mojica is a contributor editor for 365 Business Tips. From sunny Los Angeles; California State University Dominguez Hills she made her way back home to beautiful San Diego. She has a degree in Marketing, with experience in PR, and social media marketing.
