A blog is a series of diary-like entries on a website, usually written in order to entertain or educate readers. In the early days of the internet, blogging was largely regarded as a hobby (much like vlogging). Nowadays, it’s a profession for many people. Blogs have pretty much taken over from magazines and are one of the most popular forms of media on the internet. However, they are more than just a journalistic tool.
Blogs can offer anyone a platform to broadcast themselves to the world. For many businesses, they can be a valuable marketing tool. Below are just some of the reasons why your business needs a blog.
Create new doors to your website
Want to attract more visitors to your website? A blog can be an effective way of making this happen.
Running a blog on your website allows you to keep creating new content. Every new piece of content opens up a new door to potential visitors that may stumble across your website.
Some of these visitors may read your blog post and then choose to check out the rest of your site. From here you may end up converting them into customers.
Of course, in order to convert readers into customers, your blog posts need to relate to your business in some way. Customer advice and industry news are some of the best ways to create a connection. For example, if you own a real estate agency, you could consider giving out advice on moving home or you could provide news on property market trends – this is likely to attract readers who are thinking of moving home and who are therefore possibly in need of a real estate agency.
Gain trust by showing off your expertise
A blog can also be a great platform for showing off the extent of your knowledge. This could help to win over the trust of potential customers.
Let’s imagine that you own a plumbing company. A potential customer visiting your site may want a sign that they can trust you to carry out the job successfully. A blog containing posts on how to fix plumbing issues could be a great way to show potential customers just how knowledgeable you are.
Some people have become world-renowned experts off the back of blogs such as Neil Patel. It could be a way of proving your credibility beyond qualifications, awards or reviews.
Boost your search engine rankings
Starting a blog on your site could also have major SEO benefits. There are a couple ways in which a blog can be good for your site’s rankings.
A blog firstly allows you to keep adding new content to your website. Adding and tweaking content is good for your search engine rankings – failing to add new content to a website for several months could negatively affect its rankings. A blog encourages you to keep your website constantly updated.
On top of this, a blog offers an opportunity to incorporate keywords. Using a certain amount of keywords on a page could help boost your site’s rankings for that particular search term. There’s an art to using keywords – you need to be able to incorporate them naturally and you need to avoid overusing them, otherwise it could negatively affect your rankings. Keyword research tools can be useful for helping you to select the right keywords to promote.
Beef up your social media content
Social media marketing is something that many businesses can benefit from. In order for your social media to convert leads, your social media content needs to be engaging. This means not just tweeting about your product 24/7 – in fact, social media should ideally only be 20% promotional and 80% informative/educational/entertaining.
Many companies struggle to fill out their social media with non-promotional posts. Sharing your blog posts on social media can be one way of providing non-promotional content – instead of promoting your product, you’re sharing advice.
Of course, this strategy may actually result in leads. A stranger may stumble upon your post on social media, follow the link to your website and then convert into a customer. It could be an extra way of using social media to direct customers to your website.
There are automation tools that you can use to automatically share blog posts on social media once they are published. You can also reshare old blog posts to help them get more exposure.
Create cross-promotional opportunities
Cross-promotion is when two businesses both promote each other’s services. This allows you both to tap into one another’s customer bases.
How can you use a blog to cross-promote? One way could be to create a blog post promoting another company. In turn, that company could make a blog post on their own site promoting your business.
Alternatively, you could write guest content on another company’s blog. The other company can then write content on your blog in return.
Make an extra income from your blog
A blog can not only be a marketing tool, but also potentially another form of income to supplement your business. You may not make a huge amount of money out of your blog, but it could be something extra to take home.
There are many ways to monetize a blog. The most basic way to do this is to enable advertisements on your blog. Every time visitors click on these ads, you receive a small amount of ad revenue. In order to earn a lot of ad revenue, you need to be attracting a lot of visitors. In most cases, small business blogs won’t obtain enough traffic to earn anything. Fortunately, there are other income streams that you can look into.
Sponsored content is one of the easiest ways to make money from a blog. This involves a company paying you to write a blog post sponsoring their product or service. This could be a review or a news post about the product.
There’s also the option of affiliate content, which is similar to sponsored content. This is when a company asks you to create a blog post containing a hyperlink leading to their product. For every person that clicks on that hyperlinks and buys your product, you receive commission. This offers the potential to make a lot of money if the blog post gets popular.
How do I start a blog?
You can start a blog by installing WordPress or another blogging tool on your website. Once this is installed, you can start creating posts.
It’s worth planning out each post carefully so that you’re delivering high quality content – you don’t want to be churning out generic posts. At the same time, you should ideally be posting once per week. Some companies hire guest writers to help keep their blog updated, while others prefer to do the blogging themselves. It depends how much free time you have and how much you enjoy writing. There are lots of tricks to creating engaging blog posts. This guide at Walsworth offers a few great tips to consider.
