Blogging is a technique used by avid writers who like to voice their opinions on topics that interest them. The need for understanding business blogging has arisen of late. Historically, blogs were simply used by individuals offering ‘diary-style’ musings about a particular hobby or industry they were keen about and were little more than an ego trip designed to, potentially, spread the word about the subject in the hope to gain more exposure for the hobby/subject to further popularise it.
These days, blogs can still be seen as one persons viewpoint on a particular topic however, more recently, blogs have become much more of a marketing technique and the realisation that these blogs can gain epic amounts of subscribers/followers etc. These followers, subscribers and readers can potentially turn into customers, thus blogging has become one of the focal points of business strategy in recent times.
The benefits of blogging for business are huge and the potential to monetise from them is an incentive in itself to incorporate one within your business website. Whether you are a marketing professional looking to set-up an in-house blog that can help your company to grow from a small presence online to a large one, or you already have a blog but are fed up of spending hours creating engaging content to no avail in the form of increased traffic and sales, then carry on reading to find out why it is vital for your business to include a blog and to show why your efforts may be going unnoticed at the moment, but given time, you will start to reap the benefits of blogging for business.
Why do I need a business blog?
An effective blog is a major form of traffic generation to your website. If done correctly, a blog has the power to turn any small business into a thriving metropolis of sales and can boost a company that may be chugging along slowly into a serious player within the industry. There are lots of examples of businesses building industry-wide reputation on the strength of published content
If you see yourself as this ‘chugging’ company and you haven’t got a blog on your website or you do have one but you’re struggling to maintain it and keep it up-to-date, we strongly advise you take the advice from this blog and either set up a blog yourself or outsource the work so somebody else can maintain and update your blog.
Here at Tone, we offer content marketing services that can maintain and update your websites blog with new and engaging content that will increase the flow of traffic visiting your site which, in turn, will positively boost your online sales.
The Benefits of Blogging for Business
It’s all good and well knowing that you need to introduce a blog or maintain your current blog section, but understanding the benefits of doing so is the part that will give you an ‘extra spring in your word’. Knowing that you’re positively affecting business sales and growing a trusting community of followers within the industry should be incentive enough to spend time and resources blogging, but if this still fails to win you over, I’ve created a list of the main benefits of blogging for business to show you why a business blog should be the central driving force for your search engine strategy:
- Show Your Expertise - By offering readers of your blog expert advice to solve their problems within the industry, you’re subconsciously gaining trust from them so that next time they’re struggling with an issue, it will be you who they come to for advice. Keeping potential customers visiting the site will build your reputation within the industry and improve your position on the search engine results pages.
- Stand Out From The Crowd - Differentiate yourself from the competition by keeping clientele up to date with industry trends and new products that will be beneficial to them. By offering a superior service to your customers, your company will be viewed as superior as will the products you sell which will push you into the driving seat within the industry as well as increasing sales.
- Improve Your Search Rankings - Updating your blog and regularly publishing posts increases the frequency that the search engine spiders crawl your site. Keeping the bots returning regularly shows a ‘freshness’ of the site that in this day-and-age is a hugely influential ranking factor. Higher search rankings improves your visibility. Visibililty increases readers. The more people reading your site will mean more sales.
- Build a Community - By targetting your content to certain clients via social media platforms, you increase the chances of your blog post being shared. If an influential person within the industry re-Tweets your post to their 5,000 followers, it means more eyes are viewing your site and the more people viewing, the stronger you become within the industry. It starts with exceptional, engaging content.
- Effective Link Building - Creating good content that gets shared around will mean that more people and stronger sites within the industry are linking to your site. A link from a site is like an approval of your site from theirs. The more approvals and the more relevant they are, the stronger your site will look to the search engine robots which in turn will rank your site higher than your competition should they not have any links.
- Portray Your Brand - A blog offers you the chance to show who you really are as a company. You have the opportunity to step away from the professional status and become a member of the community at grass-roots level. Slacken off the boardroom tie and engage your audience with conversational content that is relevant to the problems they’re facing in the industry. Come up with friendly solutions and the ‘trust’ factor will sky rocket. The more trust worthy you are as a brand, the liklier you are to convert those leads into sales.
- Educate the industry - By having a community of followers, you can listen to their problems and offer them sensible solutions in the form of products. By gaining the trust and offering products in a problem-solving way, the customer will feel more obliged to buy it and give it a go as opposed to a salesman pushing to sell the product by any means neccessary.
If done correctly, a blog can carry the power needed to influence the marketplace where-by rather than having to go out and chase business and leads, the business will come to you. This can only happen if you build up trust and reputation within the industry and the best way to achieve this is by creating a blog for your business and using it as the central element of your marketing strategy.
Incorporate a blog into your website at all costs, the ROI that you will gain will ultimately be worth it. If you’re struggling for time to maintain the blog or need help incorporating one into your site, then we advise that you get professional help.
Don’t limit what you’re able to achieve!
Let us know if you have any blog related questions and I’ll be happy to have a conversation/debate about them.
Adam.
