Is blogging worth the time and effort in this day and age?
The short answer is, yes!
A website alone isn’t enough to make your business stand out from the crowded digital marketing environment. To fully extend your reach, you will need to attract traffic to your website by creating great content and blogging is one of the best way to achieve that goal.
While many business owners are still on the fence on whether they should start and run a blog, the truth is that they are missing out on the potential benefits of business blogging.
According to statistics, 80% of internet users read blogs and interact with social media sites. Businesses that blog generate 67% more leads that those that don’t blog.
Therefore, no matter what size of business you operate, a professional blog is an absolute must-have as part of your inbound marketing arsenal.
Here are four reasons on why you should blog:
- Drive quality traffic
- Convert traffic into leads
- Establish your business as an industry leader
- Sustainable long-term results
Drive Quality Traffic
In digital marketing, more quality leads equals higher conversion rates. Simply put; by driving more quality traffic to your website, you increase the number of qualified leads.
Most successful marketing campaign has a professional blog at the center of their social media marketing initiatives. Websites tend to experience a significant increase in overall traffic in proportion to the total number of blog posts they publish.
For many small businesses, this is a pivotal aspect of their overall digital marketing strategies. Blogging can help improve visibility as well as SEO rankings.
When your blogpost appears in the first page of a user’s search results and provides the best answer to what they were searching for, you have a match that has the potential of leading to further engagement, and eventually a sale.
By creating high quality blogposts and optimizing them for they keywords your potential customers are using, you increase your chances of landing on that coveted first page of search results. As research indicates, internet users rarely venture beyond that first page of search results.
The average blogpost can take hours to write and promote, but it’s absolutely worth the time and effort. Therefore, setting up a content plan and posting regularly will help your business to better engage with your ideal customers. It will increase trust and strengthen that critical brand-buyer bond.
To read more about how to set up a SEO content strategy, check out our blog post here.
Convert Traffic Into Leads
Blogging will not just help you reach your existing and potential customers, but also generate high quality leads. However, you have to publish the kind of blogs that users are looking to read or at the very least, answer their search queries.
You will not only get the right kind of traffic, but you will also improve your SEO rankings. Search engines now value relevant content in their rankings and the better your blog posts answers a user query, the more likely it will achieve a higher ranking.
By publishing regular, high quality blogposts that answer or solve users’ problems, you will be demonstrating that your brand is committed to adding value to their lives. They are likely to trust your brand and you will establish an important connection that will lead them further down your sales funnel.
Take some time to find the sweet spot between what your target audience wants to read and your business expertise. Then use high quality blogposts and the right SEO keywords to pull that audience to your website.
You will also have to make sure that you have the right messages in your blogposts depending on the specific stage of your sales funnel your buyer may be in. Only then can you ensure that you are getting the right kind of traffic to your website.
With the right content marketing strategy, you can set up clear pathways that will ensure you have a good chance of converting that audience into buying customers.
Establish Your Business as An Industry Leader
It’s no longer enough to just market or advertise yourself as a supplier of products and services, or simply state that you can provide solutions to your customers’ problems.
Many of the most successful companies publish regular blog posts that help them assert authority in their specific niche and to demonstrate their expertise in their respective industries.
By providing regular content that answers questions and solves problems, you are instilling confidence in both your potential and existing customers, and at the same time, creating the kind of authenticity that leads to loyalty and regular sales.
It will be highly unlikely that you will become an industry leader overnight. It’s the result of sustained effort. Regularly publishing blog posts about your niche and your user’s queries helps you establish your business as a brand authority in your industry.
It doesn’t matter the size of your business. Publishing regular, helpful, and informative blogposts will help you develop clout in your particular industry and turn you into the “go-to” authority when your audience is looking for solutions.
While ‘authority’ and ‘thought leadership’ may not seem like solid, measurable metrics such as total number of leads or total traffic, it’s quite powerful.
Consider the impact of a blogpost that informed or cleared up a confusing issue for a potential customer. How likely are they to consider doing business with you?
Sustainable Long-term Results
Blog posts live forever on the internet. With a little periodic updating, they can remain evergreen and continue to provide long-term benefits to your business.
A blogpost can continue to rank and generate leads months or even years after you first put it up on your blog. It doesn’t matter if you publish newer blog posts and the older ones roll off the first page. Your content can still get traffic from search results and continue to generate organic traffic long after you published it.
In fact, digital marketing experts suggest that an older blog post which has matured over time is more valuable than a newer one. This only means that blogging will benefit your business over the long run and help deliver sustainable growth.
Conclusion
If your business lacks an active, professional blog, then you be inadvertently handing your competitors an edge and they will likely stay ahead of you. A website and a blog are integral parts of any content marketing strategy.
By creating the kind of quality content that your customers and potential customers want to read, a professional blog can be a great starting point for all your inbound marketing efforts. When combined with all your other digital marketing efforts such as social media marketing, SEO, and email marketing, it can help grow your business over the long term.
While blogging is one of the most utilized and cost effective content marketing tools, many business owners worry about ROI which, of course, is the most important business metric. The truth is, if you put enough efforts to it, the ROI associated with blogging will far outweigh any investments and costs that are associated with it.
What is your experience with blogging? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.
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Alan Lo, Managing Partner of Stratwell Strategic Solutions, brings a decade of entrepreneurial and business development experience. Early in his career he was instrumental in building out the distribution channels of a real estate investment firm with over $2 billion in AUM. He has then founded an investment company in 2014 which he successfully exited in 2019.
2 Comments
Thanks for the useful info!
Thanks Waldo!