So what are the benefits of blogging for your business?
Most business owners are either intimidated or do not see the benefits of blogging for their businesses. There are 9 main benefits for blogging for your business, but there are also benefits of blogging for your marketing efforts as well.
1. Your Blog Helps Differentiate Your Business
One of the most important ways that a blog helps your business is by setting it apart from your competition. The truth is, there may be numerous other companies that provide the same service as you, so if you want to win over customers, it’s essential to explain what makes your brand unique and why they should choose you over the others.
Blogging gives you the perfect space to delve into those nuanced differences and explore what makes your brand stand out from the competition. Your business blog should serve as an extension of your business persona, and demonstrate its personality and unique value to its target audience. Do you have valuable experience or a unique perspective that sets you apart? There’s no better way to showcase it and attract visitors than with an engaging blog post.
“Many people decide to start a small home business to earn extra income or simply to go into business for themselves. Many small businesses are run from homes today, ranging from financial consulting and baking to salon services and tutoring.”
2. Blogs Help You Achieve Tangible Growth
While it’s nice to talk about awareness and engagement, it’s important to note that blogs are statistically proven to help your business succeed on multiple fronts. For starters, valuable blog content can help drive traffic to your website and help your business reach new audiences and warm them up to your brand.
They can also demonstrate and market your services or products just as well, if not better, than paid advertising. That’s because your audience is more likely to trust an informative blog post that they researched themselves than a paid piece of content that’s obviously meant to solicit their business.
Blogs also help your potential customers learn everything they need to know about your product or service and give you a natural and engaging way to lead your readers to your call to action, rather than startling them with an offer from the beginning.
3. Blogs Strengthen Your Communication With a Target Audience
So much talk goes on about a business’s target audience, from figuring out who they are to finding out where to find them on the internet. But once you find your target audience, what is your strategy for communicating with them? So many companies take this as an opportunity to bombard them with as much promotional material as they can stomach – an approach that often leads to content fatigue and an expensive, underperforming marketing campaign.
An active blog actually attracts leads naturally by offering valuable knowledge for free. This means that your audience will welcome your content and actively seek it out, instead of the other way around.
4. Blogs Establish Trust and Demonstrate Authority
Of course, not all blog posts will instill trust in your brand, but consistent and quality blog content will definitely grow your authority within your specific field. This means that your audience, as well as the search engines, will consider your site a trusted source of information, gaining you traffic as well as leads.
Use your blog correctly, and you can help nurture leads by addressing their most pressing and frequent questions and concerns. Not all of these have to be directly related to your business, they just have to align with your customer’s pain points.
” You can’t negotiate on trust. Customers don’t buy from businesses — they buy from people that they trust. If you want to reduce your bounce rate then you need to work on improving customer trust. ”
– Neil Patel
5. Blogs Let You Collect Feedback From Your Audience
Wouldn’t it be great to know exactly what your customers and leads are thinking? Well, thanks to blogs you can actually tap into that knowledge simply by reading through the comment section. Through this simple tactic, you can find out exactly how your audience members are reacting to a specific topic, product, or issue.
You can then use that insight to shape your future product developments, content, and marketing strategies, to give your readers more of what interests them the most.
6. Blogging Helps Improve Linking
You can improve your inbound and internal linking by running a blog, both of which serve to increase your SEO rankings and visibility. While inbound linking will depend – to a certain degree – on external sources, producing quality blog posts will highly increase your chances of being referenced by those sources.
On the other hand, you can also use your blog posts to link internally to other pages on your website, such as your products or other relevant blog posts. This makes it easier for your visitors to navigate to appropriate pages within your site and increases their time spent browsing your site.
Both of these types of links factor into your site’s SEO ranking, which determines your visibility on the search engines. It goes without saying that every small business should strive to make its brand as visible as possible in order to sustain and grow its operation.
7. Blogs Can Increase Your SEO Ranking
Going along with the previous point, a blog can help your business increase your SEO score, making your site more visible to your audience online. While there are many complex elements that factor into your small business or contractor SEO ranking, hosting a blog will certainly make your site appear more valuable and relevant in the eyes of the search engine.
The reason is that search engine crawlers highly value fresh, relevant content. If you update your blog regularly with engaging content, your site should appear as a valuable source of information to companies like Google, which hopes to give their users the most up-to-date content.
8. You Can Repurpose Your Blogs Into Social Media Content
Let’s face it, running a small business takes time, and you may not have many hours left in your day for content generation. Luckily, blog posts make for wonderful social media content and drive more engagement than regular posts because they offer much greater value to the reader.
Blog posts make for highly clickable, engaging content that drives your audience directly to your website. Give your audience plenty of value and your blog will likely increase your social media following without the need to spend time generating extra content.
9. Blogs Grow Your Email Lists and Generate Leads
Generating quality leads can be a struggle for any sized company, which is why small businesses should take advantage of the lead generation potential they can gain from regular blogging. The concept is simple, offer valuable information, and encourage your readers to sign up for regular newsletters.
You’ll be growing your email list with engaged, qualified leads that are naturally interested in your brand and welcome your communication. Once you’ve generated your email list, you can further guide your leads down the sales funnel through regular newsletters and email updates.
A Blog Is Essential To Your Success
As you can see, running a blog can play an essential part in the success of your business. The real question isn’t whether you should be running a blog, but whether you can afford not to, given the intense competition facing your brand on the internet. Remember that a successful blog must provide the reader with both qualities as well as consistency to see the desired benefits for your business. Even if you’re not particularly fond of writing, invest the time in producing free, valuable content and you’re bound to grow your company’s reach and chances at success.
Get Started With Blogging For Your Small Business Website Today!