When helping a business boost their online presence, we recommend creating a blog on their website. Clients frequently ask they need a blog in the first place. What clients are really asking is how a blog could help their business, if it’s worth committing the time and money to a blog, and if they’re going to have to write for their blog. There are several ways a blog can positively impact your business’s growth and we’ll look at common misconceptions about blogs and what a blog can and can’t do for your business.
How a Blog Impacts Your Business
One of the biggest goals businesses have is to improve their search engine ratings because they want to be accessible online. An important piece of digital marketing is publishing content that can be indexed by search engines. In addition to static pages, your blog should make up much of your content strategy. According to HubSpot companies with blogs have 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages.
Your blog can become a resource to visitors and other businesses and they can link your content with theirs. This gives you greater exposure and boosts your search engine rankings. Your blog content can also be shared in email marketing or on social media, allowing your company to gain a larger audience, something that static web page content doesn’t provide. According to Demand Metric, companies with blogs generate an average of 67% more leads per month than those without blogs. If your company has a blog, it has better marketing results.
More importantly, a blog offers a chance to establish loyalty and trust with your audience. As you increase brand awareness, provide information to aid customers, and answer visitors’ questions, you’ll be able to attract more customers and develop relationships with them.
A strong blog article can create a ripple effect where the increase in search volume brings more people to your blog’s article, causing the article’s rank to increase. The more people brought to your article, the more the effect compounds, continuing to push the search rank higher and higher. As you continue blogging, some posts may have a higher percentage of visitors than others and these are called “compounding posts.” HubSpot provides an in-depth article where they go into detail about how long, tactical articles that include content that appeals to most of a business’s target audience have the most compounding effect.
What a Blog Won’t Do For Your Business
A blog won’t sell your product, but it can educate, entertain, inspire, or inform your audience. The selling of your product will come from other parts of your sales funnel and marketing. Blogging content is the first interaction visitors have. During the initial visit to your website, there’s a low chance the visitor will make a decision about your business. The need to know if they can trust your business first, so you shouldn’t try to force a sale or else your visitors will become averse and avoid you.
A blog isn’t a magic solution that will make visitors find your website. There are other factors that influence if a blog is successful or not, such as SEO and promotion. Most of the time, the results and impact of a blog will not be evident until several months later.
Misconceptions About Creating a Blog
A common misconception about blogs is that it should appeal to as many people as possible. This is not the best way to gain followers. Your content will become weak and watered down if you aim for mass appeal. Instead, your blog should be for your buyer persona; you shouldn’t try to appeal to a market that your product isn’t aimed for. You need to research and create a strategy for posting content that is written with your company’s purpose in mind.
Another assumption is that you must constantly publish articles in order to achieve more traffic on your site. Strategy, quality, and consistency are more valuable than quantity. Planning a strong strategy will help produce better results because you are focused on writing and posting articles that will give readers the information they need and lead them to conversion. Consistency also builds loyalty and the quality of your articles builds trust.
The most successful blogs rarely succeed without outside promotion, and thinking people will be able to find your blog without additional marketing is a mistake. Successful blogs should be engaging and shareable, the first of which comes through social media or email marketing.
The Results of Your Blog
Content strategies aren’t permanent and your blog will have to evolve over time. Make sure to track any data on search results and social shares, and pay attention to your audience. Evergreen content is a trait of a good blog, but you’ll also want to make adjustments as you gather data on the results of your strategies and posting. Look into what kind of content your readers want, who your readers are, and what your readers interact with in order to adjust and improve your strategy.
Content marketing is a long process so it’s best to be patient. Wait to see how well your strategy is working before making a judgment about whether or not something is working. Make adjustments over time instead of leaping in to make frequent changes. A good marketing agency will lead you to this process, but you need to be willing to step up and do the work. Being involved in the creation of the strategy and content of your blog greatly impacts the success of it. You know your business, market, and customers than anyone else.
All this leads us to a question posed at the beginning of this article. Do you have to write for your blog? The short answer is no – an agency or freelance writer can do that. But if you choose not to write your own content, you must at least be involved in the creation of the topics and the content strategy.
We hope you now understand the purpose of a blog and how it can positively impact your business’s growth. It can be overwhelming to draw in customers online, and building a business can be frustrating. We understand that sometimes you need someone to handle what you can’t so you have more time to focus on what you’re good at. Let us know what you need because we are more than willing to lend a hand.
