Whenever you are trying to demonstrate the principles of business blogging – either to your supervisor, colleagues or anyone, feel free to direct them to this post and I hope it guides them in the right direction as to why blogging is very necessary. All small business advisors stress the importance of blogging and how it totally elevates your business website. Here’s why:
1) It helps drive traffic to your website.
Now, who does not want website visitors? Think of how the Internet routes visitors to your website:
People that type your name directly on the web browser, these visitors are already familiar with you or your work and do not increase the amount of traffic than what you already have.
Buying an email list then spam these recipients, hoping that they will click your email and get directed to your site is another way. But aside from being costly, this is also prohibited.
Paying for oncoming traffic through paid ads can also contribute to the traffic. Although legal, this can be expensive as traffic will be dependent on the consistency of your payment.
So, how does one encourage people to visit your website? Simply put, you may get these desired results through blogging, the social media or search engines. This is how it works:
Think about how many pages there are on your website and how often you update them. I assume it’s only a few and it’s not updated regularly. This is where blogging comes in. Blogging can help out you with both problems. Every blog post created adds another page that is indexed on your website and thus, a chance for search engines like Google to drive traffic to your website with the hint of newly added content and activity. It is important to know the benefits of blogging on your SEO which will be explained later on. Blogging can help guide additional traffic to your website. Social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest help bring in visitors who are not directly available to you and can even advertise your business.
Blogs could act as storage for contents used in social media channels, that way you no longer need someone else to manage and keep your social media presence in the play. The content you bring to your blog will favorably build up your social media influence along with new visitors to your website.
This is the first benefit of blogging, as it helps guide new traffic to your website along with the help of search engines and social media to do that.
2) It helps convert that traffic into leads.
With the incoming traffic your blog brings in, this gives you the chance to also convert this into leads. Similar to each entry added to your blog that becomes indexed content; each post gives a chance to generate leads by simply adding a lead-generating call-to-action in each blog entry.
Call-to-actions usually lead to free stuff like ebooks, facts sheet, webinars as well as trials, essentially any content asset that in which information can be traded. To be precise: A visitor comes to the website. The visitor sees call-to-action for a free offer and subsequently sees landing page and fills out the form and thus becomes a lead. High-quality advisors can provide you with information on how to optimise your leads process to capture more and more conversions.
Note: Not all readers that visit your site can be converted into leads, and that is just normal. Continue to add call-to-action on each blog entry, you may even set a visitor-to-lead conversion rate benchmark to gauge your website activity and progress.
3) It helps establish authority.
Sales and Service professionals often use blogs as tools. Successful business blogs answer common questions that leads and customers may have. Be consistent in creating blogs that support your audience. It helps establish you as an authority on your target customers.
Think of the impression an informational blog post you created that helps clarify questions that a customer may have. Or how many successful deals a salesman makes when their leads come upon his blog posts.
“Establishing authority” may not be as objective as traffic and leads, but may also be as effective. If you need to relate the impression of blogging to a less objective metric, try relating the concept similar with the way you measure sales enabling because after all, you can say most blog posts and sales are the same. It provides the content and information needed to make your purpose more fruitful and productive. Consider sales enabling opportunities that blogging present:
Potential customers that find their questions answered through blog posts written by people at your company will likely go through the sales process having faith in what you say since they felt the impression that you’ve already helped them – regardless if they weren’t that interested in purchasing before.
These customers that have gone through reading your blog posts will generally go through the sales process more enlightened as to your purpose or function, in the industry and what you have to propose. This type of conversation is more constructive than one held between strangers. This is also a great business branding as it builds up awareness about your site.
Salespeople that come across questions that require a thorough explanation or a documented answer may pull from a blog post archive. These speed up the pace of the sales process than having the sales representative create data from scratch. This in turn, makes the sales rep the point person for the potential buyer and serves as a good brand marketing strategy.
