If your company has a website, the chances are you’ve heard of blogging, you may even have been advised to do it yourself.
Perhaps you’ve wondered what the actual benefits of blogging are and why you should consider investing your time and effort into it? It’s a reasonable question and a perfectly understandable one, in this article we’re going to give you just seven reasons that you might want to consider giving blogging a go.
Reason 1 – It will bring more traffic to your website
Google, and other search engines, decide how to rank websites in user’s search results based on a variety of factors, the most important of which is content. Content is, simply put, the stuff on your website, your images, videos and the wording you’ve written on it.
Therefore, blogging, by virtue of creating more content on your website increases the site’s SEO footprint and therefore pushes it up the search engine rankings. As a result, you get more traffic on your website.
Reason 2 – It Will Help You Get New Customers
Blogging increases the content you have on your website. Better still, blogs are written (as this one is) about specific subjects and often are designed to answer questions people are likely to be searching for.
Specific content captures specific traffic. In other words, if someone is searching for the answer to a question that you have answered in a blog there’s a good chance they’ll land on your blog and learn the answer from you. This is typically someone who has never found your website before and they’ve now learned something new and interesting from it. Perhaps something very important to them, they’re much more likely to engage your services in helping them solve this problem for them as a result.
Reason 3 – It Will Increase Your Business’ Exposure
Most publicity is good publicity. The more interesting, engaging and entertaining content you produce the more people you’ll reach, the more they’ll share it with others and the more overall exposure your business will get. The more exposure you get the more likely it is that you’re going to get in front of prospective customers.
Exposure begets exposure and this invariably leads to increased opportunities and customer numbers.
Reason 4 – It Allows You to Show Off Your Expertise
Blogging is an excellent way to showcase your knowledge, expertise and provide examples of your work. Blogs can be articles about things you know, answers you often give or examples of work you have done.
All of which adds credence to your business and tells the readers that you really do know your stuff. If you have a business that produces a physical product or something that can easily be photographed to look impressive then taking advantage of this will be hugely beneficial and will be very likely to engage prospective customers.
Reason 5 – It Will Create Long-Term Results
Once a blog is up on your website, it is there for a long time and it will slowly grow its search engine ranking, especially if you’re employing SEO services alongside your blogging efforts. This means that one blog, written perhaps years ago, can continue to produce interest, new business, new engagement and new exposure indefinitely.
Older posts, because they’ve been up for longer and have had time to climb search rankings, can account for a very large proportion of your web traffic and leads. It is therefore good practice to go back over old blogs and update them from time to time, such activity can make a massive impact.
Reason 6 – It Will Help You Build Your Business
Blogs that do well can gain you a following. If you’re producing regular, interesting, engaging and informative content, sharing it via social media and working on your SEO to ensure it’s easy to find then you can very easily start to build up a following of people.
Voices that engage others and create such followings invariably become the most sought after and most dominant within their niche. If you do it well you’ll very quickly find that you are in high demand and your business is reaching its capacity, meaning you need to grow to take on more work.
Reason 7 – It Will Build Unrivalled Trust
Perhaps the most significant point of producing blogs is that they have a massive impact on the levels of trust your new customers have in you. We have experienced this with our business and those of customers we’ve helped blog for. Someone who has read your blogs for some time, paid attention to your content and then made the decision to come to you to buy are far more engaged than the person who was cold called and urged into it.
People who come to you through what is referred to as “inbound marketing” (which is the process of getting someone to read your content, engage with your business and then ask you if they can buy from you) are already sold on your product or service.
They believe they have made the decision to buy, they don’t believe they have been sold to. As such they’re prepared to trust you, trust your guidance and buy what you advise when they come to you. Such trust can take a long time for sales teams or account mangers to build up and the relationship will always have a sense that it was imposed by you, not chosen by the client. Blogging and content marketing has an almost unrivalled trust-building effect.
For more information on blogging or to discuss your marketing aims, objectives or activity please get in touch today for a free consultation.
