Blogging can be incredibly valuable to a variety of people and there are a variety of reasons why you should start blogging. Blogging is not just for businesses! I recommend blogging to almost everyone I meet. Let’s move on to why you should use blogging as a marketing tactic.
Attract an Audience
Blogging enables you to reach the billions of people that use the Internet. Why start blogging? Blogging can help you promote yourself or your business. Blogging works as a method for attracting an audience because it provides something of value to them before asking for anything in return.
What would you rather click on, a page titled “How to make sure your wedding day photos look great “, or a page titled “Buy Photography Services”? By creating a blog that is of value, you can attract an audience and eventually convert them to customers, partners, friends, or otherwise.
Now think about the ways people find your website:
They could type your name right in to their browser, but that’s an audience you already have. They know who you are, you’re on their radar, and that doesn’t help you get more traffic on top of what you’re already getting.
You could pay for traffic by buying an email list (don’t you dare!), blasting them, and hoping some people open and click through on the emails. But that’s expensive and, you know, illegal.
You could pay for traffic by placing tons of paid ads, which isn’t illegal, but still is quite expensive. And the second you run out of money, your traffic stops coming, too.
So, how can you drive any traffic? In short: blogging, social media, and search engines are your best friends. Here’s how it works.
Think about how many pages there are on your website. Probably not a ton, right? And think about how often you update those pages. Probably not that often, right? (How often can you really update your About Us page; you know?)
Well, blogging helps solve both of those problems.
Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website, which means it’s one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in organic search. We’ll get into more of the benefits of blogging on your SEO a bit later, but it’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what new content to surface.
Why start blogging? Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that people can share on social networks — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest — which helps expose your business to a new audience that may not know you yet.
Blog content also helps keep your social media presence going — instead of asking your social media manager to come up with brand new original content for social media (or creating that content yourself), your blog can serve as that repository of content. You’re strengthening your social reach with blog content and driving new website visitors to your blog via your social channels. Quite a symbiotic relationship, right?
So, the first benefit of blogging? It helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that.
Establish Authority
The best business blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes.
Can you imagine the impact of sending an educational blog post you wrote to clear things up for a confused customer
“Establishing authority” is a fluffy metric — certainly not as concrete as traffic and leads, but it’s pretty powerful stuff. And if you need to tie the impact of blogging to a less fluffy metric, consider measuring it the same way you measure sales enablement. Because at the end of the day, that’s what many of your blog posts are. Think about the sales enablement opportunities blogging presents:
If prospects find answers to their common questions via blog posts written by people at your industry, they’re much more likely to come into the sales process trusting what you have to say because you’ve helped them in the past — even before they were interested in purchasing anything from you.
Prospects that have been reading your blog posts will typically enter the sales process more educated on your place in the market, your industry, and what you have to offer. That makes for a far more productive sales conversation than one held between two relative strangers.
Salespeople who encounter specific questions that require in-depth explanation or a documented answer can pull from an archive of blog posts.
Having a blog and writing about important topics that are relevant to your audience establishes yourself as an authority in the space. It enhances your professional image. A blog is to professionals in the 2000s what a business card was in the 1990s. Blogs are the new business cards and help establish your Brand Awareness!
So, why start blogging? It helps convert that traffic into leads.
Now that you have traffic coming to your website through your blog, you have an opportunity to convert that traffic into leads.
Just like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads. The way this works is really simple: Just add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post.
Often, these calls-to-action lead to things like free eBooks, free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials … basically, any content asset for which someone would be willing to exchange their information. To be super clear for anyone unfamiliar with how traffic-to-lead conversions work, it’s as simple as this:
Visitor comes to website
Visitor sees call-to-action for a free offer
Visitor clicks call-to-action and gets to a landing page, which contains a form for them to fill in with their information
Visitor fills out form, submits information, and receives the free offer
If you scroll down in this blog post, you’ll see a call-to-action button. In fact, 99.9% of the blog posts we publish have call-to-action buttons … and yours should, too. That is how you turn that traffic coming to your blog into leads for your brand.
Note: Not every reader of your blog will become a lead. That’s okay. No one converts 100% of the people who read their blog into leads. Just get blogging, put calls-to-action on every blog post, set a visitor-to-lead conversion rate benchmark for yourself, and strive to improve that each month.
Why start blogging?
You need to build Rapport and Engagement
Blogging can convert traffic into leads and leads into customers. Why start blogging? Blogging can “warm-up” your cold calls and traffic from other sources. If someone receives your cold call, they may be more receptive if they’ve read your blog and received value from it. It’s all in little details like that to help you succeed.
Organize Your Thoughts and Learn
While you might not see immediate results, over time, you’ll be able to count on a predictable amount of traffic and leads for your business without any additional resource investment — the work to generate that traffic and those leads is already done. Blogging forces you to teach yourself what you don’t know and to articulate what you do know. When you begin writing a blog post, you are forced to organize your thoughts. If there are any gaps in the topic that you are writing about, you will have to learn about it. Writing out and articulating your thoughts is a great way to internalize something you’ve learned or experienced. Writing helps you become more familiar with the topic you’re writing about.
Tell Your Story
Blogging enables you to be your own media company. You can tell your story the way you want to tell it without being dependent on journalists. When you are writing about a topic of your own interest, you can decide how to portray a story, what information to include, and what information to exclude. Blogging allows you to ensure that all information included in the blog is factual.
Meet New People
The audience you attract through blogging doesn’t have to just be your “audience.” They can become your friends, colleagues, partners, or lovers. I’ve had many people reach out to me directly after reading my blog. Some of those people have become friends or good business contacts.
Stand Out
According to “the 1 percent rule,” only 1 percent of Internet users actively create new content, while the other 99 percent of the participants simply view it. By blogging, you separate yourself from the 99 percent of people that don’t blog. Standing out is essential in an increasingly competitive industry.
Validate Expertise
Why start blogging? Blogs are the new resumes. Blogging about a topic you would like to be viewed as an expert in, can illustrate to readers, employers, and your network, that you are skilled and knowledgeable.
Secondary Benefits of Business Blogging
There are other reasons businesses might want to blog, but I think they’re smaller and stray from the core benefits of blogging.
Blogs also become great outlets through with business owners can communicate other PR-type important information — things like product releases or events information. These are all great side effects or uses of a business blog, but they’re secondary benefits to me.
If you’re looking to start a business blog or get more investment for one you’ve already started, the reasons above are a great place to start arguing your case.
What Happens when you don’t have the time and expertise to start blogging?
That’s where I come it to help you bring your business online with valuable content tailored to your target audience and style!
Feeling inspired to give it a try? Contact me and let’s get started!
