I had a co-worker email me the other day asking for a blog post about the benefits of business blogging.
"It's for a friend, " she said.
Sure it was.
I told her I'd shoot over one of our up-to-date blog posts about why businesses should blog and ... I couldn't find one. Whoops. Quite the meta mistake.
First, if you don't know what a business blog is.
On the same page? Cool. Let's move on to why you should use blogging as a marketing tactic.
1) It helps drive traffic to your website.
Raise your hand if you want more website visitors. Yeah, me too.
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 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. 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.
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, if I do say so myself.
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.
2) 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.
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