Business blogging is a marketing strategy that is inexpensive, powerful, and sadly underutilised.
When done correctly, a good blog can increase awareness of your business, give you a bigger audience, and provide you a platform from which to promote your goods and services.
In this article, I’m going to talk about 5 ways that a blog, regularly updated with useful and relevant content, can be a powerful tool in growing your business.
-
Blogging attracts website traffic.
Blogging is a great way to make the most out of SEO (search engine optimisation). Suppose you’re a producer of pet foods. Your website will likely include product descriptions with words like “pet food”, “bird seed”, “kibble” and so on. By using these same words and related phrases in your blog articles, you can ramp up your site’s visibility to search engines so that when a user searches for “pet food” or similar, your website will appear higher in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Each time you publish a new blog article, you add another page to your website which increases your site’s visibility and helps boost your ranking.
A word of warning though: search engines are wise to the idea of unscrupulous site owners simply loading their sites with the same keywords hundreds of times. Therefore, keywords need to make sense within the context in which they are used, and articles are ideal for that.
-
A blog article is multi-purpose.
If you’re going to go to all the effort of writing a blog article, you might as well get it working for you. Twitter, Facebook, and similar social media platforms are ideal places to post links to your blog. A tantalising snippet, or maybe just the headline and a relevant image could be enough to get people clicking through and spending time on your website.
You can generate even more social media posts by writing a listicle such as “5 Powerful Article Types You Can Use in Your Marketing” and sending out each of the five points as individual social media posts with a link back to the main article.
-
Convert Your Visitors to Leads.
This shouldn’t have to be reiterated but it’s surprising how many business owners miss out on opportunities to turn website visitors into leads and then into customers. Through your blog, you can offer discount codes and other promotions. In return for a visitor’s email address, you can offer a freebie such as a fact sheet or e-book. And even if your blog article is not a promotion, you should still treat it as an opportunity to let your visitor connect with you further by including a call to action. This could be something as simple as a link to your contact page with the message, “Want to know more? Get in touch!”
-
Business Blogging Establishes authority with backlinks.
The more useful content you have, the more people will regard you as a trusted resource and, as a result, will link to your website. This tells search engines that you are an authority in your field, and you will rank more highly.
It’s worth remembering, however, that backlink building takes some effort. While you may be lucky enough to attract people who simply like what you do and create links to you, it is likely that you will fair better by contacting customers, suppliers and others in your industry asking them to build links to you in exchange for you creating links to them.
-
Build a repository of information.
As your business grows, you may find that you deal with the same kinds of query time and time again. If you have already published the information as a blog article, you can politely direct your client to the relevant page of your website. Similarly, when you take on new staff, your blog could be the ideal place for them to gain a better understanding of the business and help them progress rapidly.
Business Blogging by Bruce Barbour
As a small business owner providing copywriting services in Suffolk, I understand the difficulty in finding the time to market your own business when there are paying clients to service. Maintaining a blog is one of those things that takes effort and it’s no surprise that it’s a job that is frequently nudged down the list.
One way that you can ensure your blog is regularly updated is by hiring in a professional writer like me who can take the time to get you know your business, your industry, and your target market. I can write articles that are engaging, informative and relevant, that drive traffic to your website, and that invite readers to take the next step and make contact with you.
If you want your blog to work harder for your business, get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.