Here are several of the greatest benefits that blogging has on business, in addition to several real-world examples in which companies use them to grow traffic and attract new customers.
Do you desire to grow consistent traffic, attract customers, increase brand loyalty, and become an influencer in your industry? Discover the power of blogging. With written posts often including imagery and video, you are able to continuously add value through the publication of informative articles created with customer engagement and strategy in mind.
Blogging helps organizations with the following:
- Grow traffic
- Convert and nurture customers
- Keep existing customers engaged
- Stand out from competitors
- Grow interest and demand for products and services sold.
Perhaps the best part about blogging is the fact that the benefits are observed long after the initial date of publishing; for the most posts that are created, the more benefits can be received. Through the power of search engine optimization (SEO), businesses can generate organic traffic with evergreen topics to grow an audience at exponential rates.
1. Increase Traffic to a Website
Posting consistent and frequent content that drives entertainment and educational value allows a website’s traffic to increase dramatically. More traffic results in more leaders, regardless of whether an organization specializes in customers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B). Whether you market trendy fashion attire, SEO services, or a news reporting site, companies have observed substantial benefits when they frequently blog in comparison to companies that do not.
Having a larger audience on your site results in greater potential for bookings, more contact form submissions, and therefore more potential inquiries on behalf of clients. Strong traffic is essential for any business, including visitors that discovered your content as if searching for a solution to a problem.
As such, a business must utilize blogging to create content designed to speak directly to the pain points of its target audience and ensure that headlines are captivating, and describe the body paragraphs that are to follow.
2. Attract Customers
Whether shopping for motorcycle parts or shoes, the businesses that post the most consistently and frequently will find themselves attracting the most amount of attention. More attention builds on itself with the addition of more customers.
For example, it helps to ask yourself, how do you personally conduct online research prior to purchasing a service or product? You may use Google or various other search engines to analyze every single detail regarding a buying decision, regardless of size. Of course, the more expensive a service or product is, the more you’ll likely conduct research.
You’re far more likely to dissect every single review and bit of news prior to spending $3,000 on your next television, whereas you’ll probably only bother to spend less than 3 minutes to pick out a pair of cheap socks. Discovering engaging, informative blog content related to a subject can help sway customers’ opinions and become the driving factor in their purchase.
Despite the fact a blog strategy takes time, it’s almost always worth it. For instance, an educational blog allows potential customers to research solutions in their own time and contact a business when they are ready to make a purchase. Consider the following scenarios for better understanding:
- A company offering pest control services provides information regarding DIY solutions and local pests in order to maintain safety from chemicals while tackling the issue.
- A clothing company posts seasonal outfit tips and weekly predictions regarding celebrity styles.
- A local tax consultancy firm could benefit from timely searches during Q1 and provide tax advice that is keyword optimized.
No matter the case, it is critical to create blogs optimized for SEO and be relentless regarding promotional material across newsletters and social news channels. This ensures that your blog acts as a 24/7 tool that helps bring in leads and nurtures existing customers.
Many business blogs create content based on the needs of customers. This means that the content is designed to provide answers to direct questions by connecting readers to a particular solution.
However, in addition, blogs can have content based on the desires of customers. These focus on the stimulation of demand for something readers did not realize they wanted at first, such as food recipes, wellness products, clothing, or natural supplements.
This content is more difficult to create, but the key is always to make the blogs engaging and interesting enough such that people desire to read them out of sheer entertainment.
As time passes, a business can create a connection with its base of readers through the content and tone of the blog, which are all designed to foster loyalty to a brand. Imagine a lifestyle channel, like Esquire, Popular Mechanics, or Playboy.
Although it is important to entertain and inform audiences, the content must always be centered around your services and products.
3. Show & Tell The Capabilities of Your Business
For many freelancers, like personal trainers, landscapers, home contractors, web developers, etc., blogs often serve as a portfolio of past projects. This is ideal for those who require proof of past success. Furthermore, it’s critical to show potential clients what results they can expect when working with the freelancer.
With the aid of a blog, in addition to several attractive images or videos regarding past work, freelancers can create impressive portfolios to drive customers. While this may take additional effort as the site would demand frequent updates, blogs that are built on dedicated content management systems like WordPress are very easy to work with, even if you do not possess significant technical knowledge.
If you are able to write a new post to your Facebook wall, there’s no reason you can’t publish a blog with WordPress. To make things even easier, there is plenty of valuable, free advice that exists on how to maintain, update, and compose new content for WordPress blogs.
Upon beginning to catalog blogging work, all you need to do is send a simple link to those who desire to get a sense of the efficacy and quality of your work.
4. Get Results Long After Publishing
This is the most important and underrepresented benefit of a blog. A post can continue to attract audiences well into the future, on a scale of many years.
In a report by HubSpot, well over 75% of the organization’s views from blog posts are older than several months. What’s more, these older posts collect the vast majority of leads (more than 90%).
Although it is critical to create new posts, older ones can remain relevant to readers for a very long time. Old posts that have managed to acquire ranking/authority over time can bring in considerable organic traffic and be easily updated to serve the interests of current campaigns.
This is why it is also great practice to refresh older posts with new links and recent data. It often only requires several tweaks for a blog to retain its usefulness and continue to deliver qualified leads.
5. Build A Network Within A Niche
When most entrepreneurs think about blogging, they focus on the issues that matter to customers and rarely give sufficient consideration to the possibilities that networking can create.
Every single niche has a handful of valuable, trustworthy blogs. Digital marketing is quite easily an example. Yet, only a few truly stand out due to the fact that they all feature frequent and consistent blogging. You can even bet that they have the most strategic partnerships and abundant client portfolios.
A staggering number of companies track content released by competitors. Following a feed is the easiest way to observe what others in a niche are writing about. While this helps keep a business competitive, it also allows networking opportunities for others within the same niche.
Such relationships can result in links or shares to each others’ blog posts, invites to events in the industry, and entire buyouts of companies.
6. Establish a Base of Trust
In the event that a business is able to establish credibility, its reputation spreads like wildfire. Consistent and frequent blogging is the best way for a brand to build this kind of trust.
When extremely valuable content is produced that continuously adds value to readers, your brand will assume supreme authority in its niche, with customers naturally placing trust in the business. Eventually, this often leads to lifelong subscriptions.
The power of a blog is almighty. It is absolutely beneficial, irrespective of whether customers arrive with the intention to purchase something or not. Ensure that each post can have its results tracked and measured. Furthermore, keep older posts refreshed with additional links and data.
Blogging effectively helps nurture and attract more leads, then engage and capture both existing and new customers. If these methods are followed properly, your blog will produce extremely profitable results. Remember as well that there is significant influence to be had when guest posting on relevant sites within a particular industry.
This often compounds your content marketing efforts whilst providing all the aforementioned benefits.