Your business is missing out on several opportunities if your site doesn’t have a blog. Blogging can be a beneficial marketing opportunity that will drive leads from search engines and social networking. If you’ve been thinking about a blog and can’t decide if it’s worth your time and effort, here are some reasons that should finalize your decision.
1) Attract Leads and Search Engines
Before we get into other benefits, let’s start with the added sales potential. Done correctly, blog posts are like food for search engines. The more authoritative, quality content you publish on your blog, the more organic traffic you’ll receive. Blogging is a positive sign for search engines that your site is active and up to date.
Note that this doesn’t mean you should spit out just any content on the blog. It’s better to have one quality post than 10 low quality ones. Also make sure to write about content related to your business. Each post must be beneficial and relevant. There is an important difference between generating content just to have content vs generating content to help someone. Low quality content can have the opposite effect and harm your search engine visibility. So be warned!
2) Display Your Expertise to Potential and Current Customers
As the Internet continues to grow, your competition increases. One way to stand out from your competitors is to show customers that you’re an expert in the industry. Blogging is one way to convey your expertise without meetings and phone calls. Remember that search engine users are generally looking for answers to their queries. When you provide answers for these queries in an authoritative voice with a stand-out call-to-action, you drive leads from search engines through the sales funnel.
As an expert, you should know what you’re customers are looking for, and you can use this to write blog posts. Let’s say you’re a roofer and brainstorming ideas is the difficult phase of blogging for you. What questions do your customers ask when they call? What is the typical problem you see in your day-to-day job? What answers can you provide for your customers? Chances are that your customer can’t fix their roof, but they query Google for information about leaks and common problems. Write content based on this topic, and you’ll drive qualified leads directly to your inbox.
3) It’s a Long-Term Effort with Continued Benefits
Although writing a quality blog post can take some time, your post will have continued benefits. Once it’s published and starts to rank on search engines, it can continue to drive traffic for months and months. Remember to intermittently check the article for accuracy and update it if need be. You can use Analytics to measure the behavior and success of a successful blog post, but it’s not a requirement if you don’t have the time.
4) Blogging Creates a Conversation with Your Customers
A blog post opens a conversation and leaves an opportunity for your customers to respond. If you’ve ever seen a successful blog post, it often has numerous comments from visitors. Each visitor can also respond to other comments, and you can reply as well. In other words, just one blog post can invite visitors to comment and start engaging with your website. Comments might not always be positive, but you can use the feedback to create other blog posts. The feedback can also give you insight to your customers and what they expect from your services and products.
5) You Don’t Have to Be a Professional Writer
Writing can be a challenging task, but you don’t have to be a professional writer! You just need to be an expert in your field. That being said, be careful not to publish poorly written content as it can crush your SEO efforts and make your business look unprofessional. If writing truly isn’t something you can do, you can always ask an editor to fix the grammar and spelling. You use your own message and expertise while letting the editor bring the professional writing requirement to ensure the post has quality content.
6) Central Landing Point for Social Marketing
You may have heard that social networks should be a part of your marketing. Many business owners don’t know where to start, what to tweet, or what to post on their Facebook page. With a blog, you can share your content across social media platforms to drive traffic directly to your site. Sharing expert blog posts in social media is a great way to gain exposure in addition to search engines.
7) Blogging Keeps Your Site Up-to-Date with Industry News
Most business owners blog about trends in their market and the latest news in the industry. This type of content provides search engines with fresh content that isn’t already saturated. It also keeps your site up-to-date with the latest news and trends which can be greatly helpful to your customers. When you write content based on the latest news, you drive more traffic to your site and have fewer competitors. Evergreen content is good to have!
8) Your Site Doesn’t Look Abandoned and Builds Trust
Have you ever come across a blog that hasn’t been updated in months? It gives you the feeling that the site is abandoned. This is especially true for site owners that don’t keep their site content up-to-date. With a blog, users know that you’re taking care of your business and care about your web presence. It shows that you want to connect with your customers, and it builds trust. Trust is an important factor in web marketing. With hundreds of competitors to choose from, visitors want to know that they are dealing with a trusted professional.
9) It’s Fun and Can Be Profitable!
You never know – you might actually enjoy blogging. It takes work and has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, you might actually like it. Some business owners even find writing therapeutic, so it can be an advantage for you personally and not just professionally. Here are a few tips that will help you monetize your blog.
What are the Disadvantages of Blogging?
Blogging has its benefits, but it can also have its drawbacks.
Not every industry has a blogging audience. If your average customer base isn’t using the Internet much, or they’re just not interested, then blogging is probably not worth the effort and time. It also takes a long time sometimes to get your blog noticed – you’ll have to put some serious time to get it off the ground.
It’s Easy to Get Started
If you already have a website, it’s usually easy to add a blog. Website builders like Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy let you activate one with a few clicks. It’s also a core feature of WordPress. Look at our review of these 5 Website Builders for Blogging.
Managing a blog with GoDaddy Website Builder
If you haven’t got a website yet, I would recommend you to look into Squarespace and WordPress since these are the two website builders that have the strongest blogging features.
Conclusion
Regardless of which blog platform you use, blogging can be a worthwhile part of your marketing strategy. We hope you found the above reasons helpful when making your decision!
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