Why Does My Business Need a Blog?
Your business has a website. Your business has a Facebook account. Your business even has a Twitter account. So why does it need a blog? Well, let’s take a look at some of the reasons why your business would benefit.
Traffic to Your Website
Everyone wants more visitors visiting their website. How do they find you right now if they don’t already know you exist? You cannot buy email lists because that is illegal. You could pay for traffic by placing search ads, but this is quite expensive. When the money runs out, so does your website traffic. So what can you do? That’s easy… Blogging, social media and search engines are the key.
Think about how many pages you have on your website. Probably not too many. Now think about how often these pages get updated. Maybe once in a blue moon, right? Let’s face it, how can you really update your About Us page? Well, lucky for you, blogging will help you solve both of these problems!
Think about this… Every time you write a blog post, another page is indexed on your website. This cues Google as well as other search engines that your website is active! It also tells these search engines that they should be checking in frequently to see new items your website has published. Each time your website adds an indexed page, your opportunity increases of showing up in search engines and traffic is driven to your website through organic searches.
Social Media
Do you want help in getting discovered on social media? Well, every time you write a blog post, you are creating content that people can share on social networks. Platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+ help expose your business to new audiences that don’t know about you yet.
Blogging also helps your social media presence. Instead of constantly coming up with new social media content, your blog can serve as content. You are accomplishing a few tasks now; strengthening your social reach with your blog content and driving new visitors to your website to view your blog.
Convert Traffic into Leads
Once you have traffic visiting your website, you have the opportunity to convert that traffic into leads. When a new blog is posted to your website, you are not only gaining a newly indexed page, but you are also generating the opportunity for new leads. This can be accomplished by adding a lead-generating call-to-action on every post.
Many times a call-to-action is something that is free. An item such as a free ebook, free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials… you get the idea. Basically any content that someone is willing to exchange their information for! To make it even simpler, take a look:
- Someone visits your website
- Visitor sees the call-to-action button with a free offer
- S/He clicks the call-to-action button and gets to a page that contains a form to fill out with pertinent information
- The form is submitted and the free offer is received
When a visitor to your website scrolls to the bottom of your blog, he should see a call-to-action button. This allows you to turn traffic coming to your blog into leads for your sales team!
Establish Authority
The advantage to establishing a business blog is that you can answer common questions that come from your leads as well as your customers. When you constantly create content that targets customer concerns, it establishes you as an authority in their eyes. Just imagine sending an educational blog written by you to a customer who is unsure? Or the deals your salesmen can close just from leads discovered through the blog content?
Long Term Results
After you have written and posted a blog, you will receive views and leads spread out over a few days. But it doesn’t stop there. Your blog is now ranked in search engines. That means that for days, weeks, months and even years to come, you will continue to receive traffic and leads from that blog post. Actually, about 70% of the traffic you receive each month comes from posts that were not published that month! Now that’s some pretty awesome news!