For many, blogging is a “someday” business ideas that you think you don’t have time for right now, or just never get to on your to-do list. In reality, a blog should be considered an important part of your marketing strategy that you need to make happen.
A blog serves a number of valuable purposes:
Your Blog is Your Digital Salesperson
Every conversation you wish you could have with your ideal customer, you can have – through a blog post! People are more likely to read something than to listen to you go on and on for 20 minutes in your sales pitch. Objections that are most often raised to your product or service? Address them in blog posts with a positive spin to turn the objection into a reason to purchase. A blog post allows a prospective customer to read through all the great things about your business, learn deeper insights, and connect your business to their own lives. Blogs offer helpful information and insights to your audience, helps readers understand how you can help them – a much more compelling reason to purchase than a sales pitch about how great you are.
Your Blog Increases Your Website SEO
A blog will improve your search engine visibility. Search Engine Optimization, SEO, calls attention to your website, raising your ranking in organic searches by your prospective customers. What a blog does organically for SEO is provide new content to your site, and offers up keywords and search terms that grab the attention of search engine bots. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing can more easily find and index your blog entries, making it far more likely that your website will appear higher in search results over your competitors.
A huge portion of a good SEO plan is adding content to your website. However, once you have a completed website, with all your products and services described, your key marketing messages, and contact information, what can you add for new content? Without a regularly updated online presence, your website will simply disappear deeper into the mass of information online. A blog can be the single best marketing investment that you can make because it will add consistent, interesting content to your website!
Your Blog Builds Brand Awareness
Your brand strategy doesn’t stop at a logo, tagline and company color scheme. A blog allows a business to really express their personality. Posts can be more informal, more conversational, making your business feel accessible. Consumers can relate with you on a more authentic level through your blog.
A blog helps establish you and your company as an expert in your industry, and go-to in your local service area. When you freely share your expertise, visitors will identify your business as the one with the knowledge and professionalism to handle their needs. When you answer your audience’s key questions, you capture their attention and build a deeper connection with them.
Your Blog is an Extension of Your Customer Service Department
Every business has question they receive and answer over and over again. This is not only tedious and time-consuming, it can halt the purchasing decision process. Not good. Your blog is a great opportunity to answer those most commonly asked questions, even address the most common concerns and objections you hear. And when you are responding to someone individually, just send them the link to your page that addresses the question – saving time, driving traffic to your website, and making you look like a prepared professional.
Your Blog Provides Great Content for Other Purposes
One of the greatest things about a blog? One blog can provide numerous social media posts and deliver valuable content for your newsletters. Simply pull key pieces of information out of a blog post – post a compelling sentence, specific statistic, or useful example, a little at a time, for any number of social media posts. Your latest blog is a great reason to reach out to your email list, and makes an e-newsletter a reason to open and read it. All these links send people back to your website to learn more. Win-win!
“Blogging helps your business to compete. Blogging helps to show the personality, information, and experience that will distinguish your business from competitors and even compete against larger companies. If you want to make yourself known to your target audience, your business needs a blog.” — HubSpot Marketing
How Often Do I Need to Blog?
You do not have to blog as often as you might think. There is data that states you must blog numerous time per month and that blogs must be a certain length to have good reach. While sure the more the merrier is true, anything is better than nothing! Don’t let the overwhelm of meeting some set number of posts discourage you from even starting.
How to Get Help
By marketing costs averages, blogging is relatively inexpensive. Whereas advertising costs thousands of dollars, blog posts are a few hundred. And it’s your content to use how you want, where and when you want, for multiple purposes!
The challenge is that it can be hard to find time to come up with blog topic ideas, let alone write the blog, when you’re juggling so many other responsibilities. Hiring a professional copywriter to brainstorm, research and write your blog posts is a great investment!
I have clients that I only do one blog post per month for, then push that post out to their social media, and they have consistently seen 50% or greater increase in page views. This effort, combined with intentional SEO practices, has proven to be a huge online traffic builder.
We have all sorts of blogging options to help you get started – for all levels of involvement and budgets. Please let us know how we can help you get started and boost your business online in 2019!