The Benefits of Business Blogging
| Are you looking for ways to test the effectiveness of the individual and team performance within your workplace? Perhaps Challenge Consulting can help? Challenge Consulting’s Team Effectiveness Profiling (TEP) process is a complete system designed to facilitate self-awareness and team improvement, and to enhance effectiveness, where surveying is only one of three steps. For more information, click here. |
Social media is becoming an increasingly influential force in our personal lives. Businesses need to capitalise on society’s need for this social interaction. As the success of media like Facebook, Instagram and Google+ show, people crave personal connections and that wish for personal connection applies to the businesses they patronise.
Blogging on your business website provides that social connection with both current and potential customers. Blogging has evolved along with social media and web usage as an important cultural element. Most people read blogs. As a business owner you would be missing out by not including it as part of your overall marketing strategy.
There are five important reasons regular blog posts should be part of your business website. Most of these reasons encourage more traffic. More traffic = more potential customers.
1. Blogs boost your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Every blog post is an indexed page. The more pages that appear in search engines, the more chances that traffic will be driven to your business site. Search engines also like active sites. Post often and your activity will push you higher in search engine ranking and your site becomes easier to find. Result – you get more traffic!
2. Blog Post traffic can become sales leads. Include a Call to Action in your posts. Offer anything anyone would be willing to exchange personal information for. This strategy turns some of your blog traffic into leads for your sales team. Offers could include:
3. Blogs can establish you as an Industry Leader. By allowing customers to ask questions or make comments which you reply to promptly, you set up yourself as an industry leader. Creating helpful blog content makes you an authority figure to your audience. Ultimately, word spreads and your traffic and potential customers increase.
4. Blog posts connect people to your brand. Through blogging, you add a personal touch to your business site. This allows you to provide a sense of corporate standards, your company vision and your business personality. People respond strongly to familiarity.
5. Blogs create opportunities for social media sharing. Most blog posting formats allow for the inclusion of social media buttons. Visitors to your blog can easily share blog posts and your website with their Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ followers (to name only a few sites) exposing your site to many new potential visitors while giving you a strong social presence.
Ultimately, blog posts that include evergreen content will work for you 24/7. While you are sleeping, on vacation, having dinner with your family, blog posts are working for you driving traffic to your site. A few hours of effort now can give thousands of sales leads and views for the foreseeable future.
You might be asking after reading this blog post, “What do I do if I’m not a writer?” I have to say, most everyone has the skills to write a blog. You have expertise of your own business. You are the best person to share that knowledge with your audience. The good news is the blogging writing style tends towards the more informal. So, the pressure is off. And if grammar and spelling are your downfalls, most blogging platforms come with excellent spell-check and grammar-check tools.
If you are still intimidated by the blogging process or your schedule is too full managing your larger-scale business, you can always find someone on your team who has the skills and expertise or you can outsource by using guest bloggers or hiring a copywriter.
There are many benefits to blogging for your business. All of them add that personal touch to your company by connecting with present and potential clients. Blog posts increase your presence on the web driving more traffic to your business web site and making it more likely your bottom line will improve. Whether you write the posts yourself, delegate to a trusted employee or partner or outsource, you’ll be pleased with the increase in exposure and sales this marketing tool can bring.
