Recently we were invited to present at the AFCC 2018 Conference for Civil Celebrants, where spoke about the business blogging – what it is, the impact it has on SEO and how it can transform your business. We thought we’d share the main 4 benefits of Business Blogging with you.
1. Drive traffic to your website through Business Blogging
Think about how many pages there are on your website, probably not a lot, right? People usually stick with the 4 general pages… home, about us, services and contact us. Now think about how often you update those pages. Again, I’m thinking not that often?
Business Blogging helps solve both these problems. One of the things Google likes the most is a frequently updated website. And every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website, which means it’s one more opportunity for you to show up in Google and bring traffic to your website.
Business Blogging also can support your social media pages by driving traffic to and from your social media accounts. Have you ever wanted to post to your social accounts but just been stuck on what to post, so you share someone else’s post? Sharing other people’s content on these sites is great, but at some point, don’t you want to be directing those potential leads and sales to your own site instead of someone else’s? When you share your own blog posts on social media, you increase traffic to your OWN website. Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that other people can also share on their social networks – which can help to expose your business to a new audience that may not know you yet.
2. Convert the traffic
Once you know who your audience is and what problem you’re solving for them you can create your blog post, which gives you the opportunity to bring in new traffic and then convert that traffic into leads. Once you have a lead, you then have the ability to convert that lead into a sale, and the way traffic-to-lead conversion works is simple: Just add a call-to-action or CTA to every blog post. You may be asking yourself what a call-to-action is? Often, they are things like free eBooks, free fact sheets or free webinars. Essentially, it’s anything free that is valuable, and someone would be willing to exchange their email address for. Maybe you’ve even signed up to a few of these yourself.
These call-to-actions are invaluable as they help convert leads into sales. Once you have the lead’s email address you can send them automated email campaigns and newsletters and really build and nurture a relationship – sharing past client stories, case studies, testimonials, recent works and so much more. It’s a fantastic way to build trust with them before they’re ready to take that next step, and when they are finally ready to take the next step and make that sale, they’re most likely going to call you because they already have that relationship. The brilliant thing about this is it can be a set and forget campaign. You only need to set it up once, and then watch it keep working from the sidelines.
After some ideas on Call to Actions? Click here to read more about it.
3. Drive long-term results
Don’t you think it would be cool if you could bring people to your website and generate new leads whilst you’re out of the office… either at the gym, on holiday or helping another customer. It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?
Let’s say you sit down for an hour and write and publish a blog post today. Let’s say that blog post gets you 100 views and 10 leads. You get another 50 views and 5 leads tomorrow as a few more people find it on social media and some of your subscribers catch up on their email. But after a couple days, most of the excitement from that post has died down and you’ve achieved 150 views and 15 leads. It doesn’t stop there.
The beauty about business blogging is now that blog post is ranking in Google. That means for days, weeks, months, and years to come, you can continue to get traffic and leads from that very same blog post. So, while you’re out and about, and not in front of the computer slaving away, the effort you put in yesterday can turn into hundreds or thousands of views and leads in the future.
4. Position yourself as a person of authority from Business Blogging
Another great thing about a business blog is it can also help establish you as a position of authority, in the eyes of your competitors and your customers. It’s one of the best ways to establish yourself or your brand as an expert in your field because it gives you a platform for sharing important industry-related information and insights.
The best business blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes. If potential customers find answers to their common questions through blog posts written by you, they’re much more likely to come into the sales process trusting what you have to say because you’ve already helped them in the past – even before they were interested in purchasing anything from you.
Think of business blogging as another marketing channel, just like social media or email marketing, it helps to support your business growth. And it does this by bringing traffic to your website and providing opportunities to convert that traffic in some way. It can also drive long-term results and can assist in establishing you as a position of authority.
