Has your business been toying with the idea of launching a business blog? Maybe you’re unaware of all the benefits, or you have a blog but are not convinced that keeping it active will do any good. The SocialNicole business blog has been around for 8 years, and in that time we’ve learned more than a thing or two about blogging – not the least of which being how worth it a business blog can be!
A blog can help your business reach marketing and sales goals by growing your community, driving traffic to your website, and establishing your business’s expertise. A blog will also help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your business by providing your website with regular, fresh content, and giving you ample opportunities to boost your search engine rankings with links and keywords. If your business is considering starting a business blog, then you are on the cusp of reaping some pretty major benefits (mainly driving new customers into your sales funnel)! If you still need convincing, read on for reasons that your business should consider launching a business blog today.
If you are ready to skip this post and get your business blog up and running check out 5 Tips For Starting a Successful Business Blog now!
Business Blogs Support Social Media Marketing
A major reason any business should consider running a business blog is the opportunity for social media marketing that blogging presents. Blogging can be a key component of your business’s social media marketing strategy. A blog allows your company more space to expand on ideas and expertise than traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow. This gives your business the opportunity to engage more deeply with your community, and share your expertise with them in a meaningful way.
While your business’s blog is not technically a social media platform, your blog content can be used as social media content. Sharing teasers about a topic on Facebook or Twitter and then a call to action with a link to your blog can help to both drive traffic to your website and sales funnel and also to provide your business with fodder for its social media platforms.
1. Blogging Establishes Authority On Social Media and Can Drive Sales
Let’s be honest, the goal of all marketing is to drive sales. So anything you invest in should do just that. While blogging can seem laborious and the benefits are not immediate, the fact is a business blog should be your number one investment for content marketing. While blogging is playing a long game, it is also a game worth playing and once you establish yourself and your blog it will pay back over and over again with increased sales and business growth!
Just think about it. By establishing a business blog you become your own publisher, meaning you don’t need to wait for a reporter to tell the world you are an expert. Gone are the days where businesses were dependent on the publishing world to be noticed. As the publisher you have power. So use it!
Blogging helps show your audience that you are an industry expert, that you know the ins-and-outs of your specific field of expertise, and that you are contributing to the conversation as a thought leader. Establishing your authority on a topic will build trust with your audience and show them they can get their answers from you. You can do this by writing informative, helpful, and thought-provoking blog posts about what is going on in your industry, while anticipating the questions your audience may have.
2. Blogging Builds Community And Social Media Marketing is All About Community
One reason your business blog can be great for social media marketing is the community your blog can help cultivate. When a business establishes a consistent, quality blog that addresses relevant topics or problems within its niche, it does itself a favor. People will want to keep coming back to a blog that helps them or piques their interest over and over. This will help form more personalized relationships with your audience and potential customers, and can lead to comments, likes, and shares on social media. Engagement helps create brand awareness and that means success for social media marketing.
3. Blogging Enhances Social Media Driven Traffic
Publishing on your business’s blog regularly and continually sharing your own posts on social media can drive traffic to your website and into your sales funnel. A blog that is updated regularly provides your business with fresh content to share, perpetually giving your audience and customers another reason to visit your site, gain trust and keep coming back until they decide to buy from you!
Blogging also gives your audience plenty of content to continue sharing on their social media pages – this will help to increase brand awareness for your business and drive people to your website. By providing a call-to-action at the end of your blog post, you are able to drive the reader to other pages on your website and through your sales cycle.
And don’t forget to use Facebook ads to drive people to read your blog. It’s a great tool to increase awareness among your target audience. You can then retarget the traffic to your blog into a Like ad to get the same readers to like your page. And even retarget to sell your products and services. It’s a gold mine for retargeting and growing business if done correctly.
Business Blogs Expand Organic SEO
Another major reason your business should be publishing a blog is the immense benefit a business blog can bring to your company in terms of organic search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can be a bit hard to wrap your head around, but it is anything you can do to gain traffic from organic (non-paid) elements of your content that bring your page higher up in search results. Your blog should be your #1 approach to ranking higher for keyword searches on Google. If it’s not you are missing out. Not showing up on Google is like having a closed sign on the door of your business.
Why is blogging the most important thing you can do for your organic SEO?
1. Blogging Keeps Your Content Fresh
You want your site to appear higher in a Google search, right? Search engines reward sites that are frequently producing fresh content, but the chances are, you’re not giving the static pages on your website a makeover every month, nor should you. Enter your business blog! Publishing a blog that you’re updating daily, weekly, or even monthly helps to keep new content appearing on your website.
Fresh, quality content will keep your business blog a relevant voice in your field. If you continually produce fresh, quality content on new topics that pertain to your business and are useful to your target audience, this sends the almighty Google algorithm signals that you are a relevant, knowledgeable source of information in your field. Google rewards that by giving you more credit or “juice” in your search rankings. Think of it this way: would you prefer to visit a surgeon who keeps her skills up to date and is relevant for that upcoming surgery? Or are you willing to trust a surgeon who has never updated her skills or doesn’t share those updated skill sets with you? You would go with the surgeon who has updated skills! The concept is similar with blogging. Show Google you are the relevant, up-to-date expert with quality content, and Google will reward you.
Another reason fresh content helps SEO is that it causes your site to be “crawled” more frequently. “Crawling” refers to the “spiders” or bots that search engines send out to scour your web pages, checking for all the elements (such as headers, keywords, etc) that help your site rank higher in a search. When you add a post to your blog these “spiders” are notified and will “crawl” the new page. This data is stored and will appear in the results when someone uses a search engine to search something that appeared in the new post. When you keep producing fresh content, your site is being crawled more often, which can boost its search engine rankings.
2. Blogging Gives Opportunity for Linking
When you write a blog post for your business, you can include outbound links to external sites. Outbound links can be rewarded by search engines, making them a helpful element of SEO. The objective of search engines is to direct searchers to a site that will answer their question – and thus, posts that include links are rewarded, because the search engine sees this as helpful to the searcher.
Even more effective are inbound links – places in which other sites link to your site in their posts. Inbound links improve your website’s ranking because your business is being recognized as authoritative on a topic when another site refers their readers to you by linking to your site. You can increase your chances of receiving inbound links by posting quality, fresh content and showing yourself to be an expert in your niche.
3. Blogging Increases Keyword Visibility
Creating blog posts that are focused on popular search keyword phrases is a cornerstone of any good content marketing strategy, because your goal is to rank high organically on a Google search for keyword phrases. Your keyword phrase will be a short phrase that tells what your blog post is about, so individuals searching a subject will find your post.
Do some digging to try to find popular and relevant keyword phrases. Keyword phrases are most effective when used in headers, and blog posts are generally lengthy enough to contain multiple headers. You should be using your keyword phrase in each header, as well as throughout the post. It is good to use the keyword phrase within the first paragraph of the post, and again near the end, with it also sprinkled a few times throughout. Use your keyword phrase in and around the links you include and in the file name and caption of any photos in your blog post. Just make sure to stay away from keyword stuffing – spamming the post with the keyword phrase – as this can actually hurt your post’s SEO ranking.
Starting a blog could be the next step to open doors for your business. Running a business blog can help with your marketing strategy by growing your community, driving traffic to your website, and establishing your business as an authority in your field. A blog can also help with SEO by keeping the content on your website fresh, and by providing you with opportunities to use keywords and links. Most importantly a business blog can help drive leads and increase your sales. These are great reasons to consider blogging for your business. Ready to take the leap towards business blogging? If so, read our tips for starting a business blog here.
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