Thinking of starting a blog for your business? 🤔 You should be! Blogging can create great opportunities to skyrocket your brand awareness, and grow your customer base and revenue. These are just some of the benefits of blogging.
Over the years, blogs have grown from a medium of expressing oneself to a means of online marketing and selling. It comes as no surprise that blogs are now an important component of almost all businesses that want to operate online. Continue reading to learn some more about the common benefits of blogging and take your first steps to launching your own blog today! 🚀
Key benefits of blogging for business, growth, and marketing
- Generates traffic for your business website
- Converts cold traffic into hot leads
- Establishes you as an authority in your niche
- Provides a platform to share media updates about your business
- Helps create strategic connections with other business owners
- Opens doors for speaking engagements
- Helps you connect with your audience directly
- Gives you content you can then repurpose on social media
- Stays online for years, providing long-lasting results
- Serves as an effective marketing vehicle for your business
1. Blogging generates traffic for your business website
One of the main benefits of blogging is that you can attract a ton of traffic to your business.
How?
By publishing blog posts that are of high quality and that match the search intent of your readers.
I’m not talking about paid traffic, but free traffic from search engine giants like Google. Studies show that businesses that blog have 55% more website visitors than those that don’t [1].
That’s because each blog post that goes live has the potential to get discovered by prospective customers through Google and other search engines.
With a blog, you can also generate organic traffic from social media platforms by frequently sharing blog posts using appropriate/trending hashtags.
As long as you regularly publish well written blog posts that are optimized for SEO, you increase your chances of reaching new people and putting your business on their radar. If you stay consistent with your publishing schedule, the cumulative effect will eventually kick in and your traffic will multiply.
2. Blogging converts cold traffic into hot leads
Only a few channels can compete with blogging when it comes to warming up your cold audience into customers that come in hot, wallet in hand.
One of the benefits of blogging in this regard is that it affords you the opportunity to keep in constant touch with your leads. Over time this warms them up to buy from you as they move from one point to another in their buyer’s journey or through your sales funnel.
Apart from keeping in touch with your people through blog posts, you can also use email marketing to communicate with them directly and build additional trust.
3. Blogging establishes you as an authority in your niche
Having a series of blog posts on a particular topic can elevate you to expert status in your field. This applies even if you don’t possess any specific academic or professional background.
It’s reported that 77% of internet users read blogs – which is a lot – and all those people do it for very specific reasons [2]. Some look for solutions to problems, others for entertainment, and the rest are interested in niche topics that relate to their hobbies or professional field. Whatever it might be, staying consistent with your content will grant you the spot of a thought leader in the space.
This sort of authority can then be leveraged when promoting a product or offering a service to your market.
4. Blogging provides a platform to share media updates about your business
Another item on our list of benefits of blogging is that blogging enables you to share news and stories about the latest developments in your company. This helps to keep your audience interested as they get to know the current happenings of your business.
Stories about new products, features, press releases, new staff, and general news about your brand can be shared with your blog readers. This way, you give your reader’s a bird’s eye view into your current projects and somewhat make them feel like they’re part of these events. This sort of communication is much better than just blasting people with one promotional message after another.
Without a blog, all you can do is share updates on social media. This is fine, but you are not in control of the medium. You have to rely on a third party – the social media platform – to deliver your message to people who are interested.
5. Blogging helps create strategic connections with other business owners
Owning a blog creates a lot of opportunity to build relationships with other companies in the field. This can potentially turn some of your competitors into partners.
One way bloggers forge relationships is by guest posting. One study reports that 60% of surveyed blogs write between one and five guest posts every month [3]. Building connections like these can surely fast track the growth of your business.
Another aspect of this sort of relationship building is that you can establish connections with your readers. Some of them are business owners like you. Overall, this is a win-win situation as the more networks you create through your blog, the more opportunities for growth present themselves.
6. Blogging opens doors for speaking engagements
Blogging helps you get found by industry experts who might want to invite you to speak at their events.
As your blog posts gain a wider reach over time, you can launch a separate speaking career (or side gig) on the back of it. The best thing about speaking is that opportunities often snowball after you get your foot in the door. Furthermore, speaking at a popular event in your industry instantly strengthens your authority and further solidifies your status as an “expert”.
To increase your chances of attracting requests for public speaking, you can create a couple of blog posts advertising it as one of the services you offer.
7. Blogging helps you connect with your audience directly
A study by Sprout Social reveals that 64% of customers want brands to connect with them [4]. Blogging is perhaps one of the best ways to achieve that. This is one of those benefits of blogging that can’t be ignored.
Writing blog posts consistently provides several touchpoints for your audience. This constant connection activates the Know, Like, and Trust (KLT) factor, making it easier to convert your audience into paying customers.
Staying in direct contact with your audience through your blog also helps you to learn about your customer behavior, and make adjustments on how best to serve them.
With this connection, blogging keeps your customers frequently engaged with your content, and they can provide you with immediate feedback to questions and surveys should you need it.
8. Blogging gives you content you can then repurpose on social media
Blog content isn’t the only format that internet users like to engage with these days.
In fact, blog posts offer lengthy and more comprehensive materials that can be converted into content for social media. So, if you’re struggling to keep your profiles afloat with new updates, then your blog posts can serve as a source for that purpose.
As your social media presence grows with this repurposed content, the traffic that’s earned from this will naturally flow back to your blog.
This wouldn’t be possible without fresh blog content to draw inspiration from in the first place. That’s why blogging can be such a helpful of a tool for the growth of your business.
9. Your blog content stays online for years, providing long-lasting results
Unlike social media content that could go viral one minute and fade out the next, your blogging efforts can reap rewards for years to come.
This can only be achieved if you create evergreen content.
What’s evergreen content?
It’s content that isn’t seasonal and will stay current for a long time – even indefinitely. One way to ensure that it stays valid is to audit your most valuable and important posts regularly. If something about them is out-of-date, then update the outdated information accordingly.
This will accomplish two things.
First, it’ll show Google that you care about your content and are putting an effort into keeping it updated. Second, it will also ensure that your readers can find accurate information on whatever topic they’re looking for.
In this regard, blogging has a huge advantage over other marketing channels like email or social media, since those ultimately move down the news feed and are usually forgotten about forever.
⚠️ Note: make sure to integrate your blog with tools like Google Analytics to keep tabs on your traffic numbers, most popular posts, and any trends in your overall readability.
10. Blogging serves as an effective marketing vehicle for your business
This final benefit of blogging kind of ties together all the ones before it. As a matter of fact, no other online marketing vehicle creates opportunities on par with blogging or lets you capitalize on them as effectively.
Your blog can be the center point of all the other marketing strategies in your portfolio. For instance, it can be the hub for all email promotions or social media shout-outs you’re posting.
The marketing opportunities are endless. You can maintain contact with your audience, reach out to more customers, or continue nurturing leads all through the same blog.
We can turn to Influence and Co. for a real life example of this. They leveraged the use of SEO-optimized content on a client’s blog to achieve a 70% increase in lead generation [5].
70%! That’s not a little bit.
How did they do it?
By performing keyword research every quarter of the year. They then created content that aligned with SEO best practices, and collaborated with the client’s sales team to get leads to take action on the website.
You can do all of this on your blog as well. It’ll take some work, but it can be done.
Final thoughts on the benefits of blogging
These have been the key benefits of blogging and how to best take advantage of them. Now that you know the full scope of the opportunities that it can bring you, what is your next step going to be?
⚠️ Note: Don’t have a blog yet? If you’re wondering how to set one up, the easiest way to do that is to sign up with a company like Bluehost. Bluehost has been renowned for their web hosting offering and how easy it is to start a new blog using their platform – it only takes a couple of steps:
- 🏁 Start by going to Bluehost and signing up for a web hosting plan. The cheapest one starts at $2.75 per month. For that price, you also get a free domain name bundled in for the first year.
- ⚙️ During the sign-up process, tell Bluehost to install WordPress on your hosting account. WordPress is the most popular website engine, and also one of the easiest to use.
- 🎨 Pick a theme – a design – for your website and install it through a couple of clicks.
- ✍️ Write your first blog post and publish it for the world to see.
References
[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5014/study-shows-business-blogging-leads-to-55-more-website-visitors.aspx
[2] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/the-benefits-of-blogging-20-stats-business-owners-need-to-know-infograph/511816/
[3] https://optinmonster.com/blogging-statistics/
[4] https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/social-media-connection/
[5] https://blog.influenceandco.com/case-study-improving-lead-generation-results-by-70-with-seo-content
