Do you have a business blog?
A blog literally sells your services on autopilot once your content begins to rank on search engines.
It’s disappointing, however, to note that some businesses are not leveraging the power of business blogging to achieve their marketing goals.
You see, blogging builds trust with your audience. If you update your blog regularly, it shows that you care for your customers and their businesses.
In generating traffic, about 65% of daily internet browsers visit blogs. Therefore, a blog has a good chance of attracting those prospects to your website, hopping into your list, and ultimately purchasing your offers.
What’s business blogging?
Let’s begin this with the basics of blogging. I have noted that some people fail to differentiate between a website and a blog.
What you need to know is that a website is static and hard to update regularly. A blog is a section within a site where you can share your thoughts with the world regularly
It’s one of the organization’s digital marketing channels. A blog post is a piece of content on a blog that talks about a specific topic.
Blogging is the art of publishing and updating new blog posts on your blog.
What about business blogging?
Well, it’s an inbound content marketing tactic, that a business can undertake to drive traffic, generate leads, and increase its brand recognition.
Some people blog for fun, but in one way or the other, you will need to make money from your hobby. You will then need to treat your blog as an essential marketing element.
No business blog? Here is why you need it today:
Having a business blog is not a nerve-wracking task. If you are using WordPress, it’s only a few clicks away.
1. Brings in organic traffic from search engines
It’s hard to rank a website without blog content. Unless there is no other similar content on the internet.
However, with the current digital era, where there are about 1.6 billion live websites, it is worth having a blog and tapping into a share of the organic juice.
Your customers are regularly searching for answers to their challenges. As they consult Google and other search engines, let them find your blog in the search results.
Once they land on your site, let them find immense value in your targeted blog content. They will then opt into your email list and become your regular buyers.
Therefore, a properly optimized blog will reduce your marketing cost and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
You will have to undertake intensive search engine optimization (SEO) to attract many qualified leads since not all web visitors convert into customers.
2. Helps to build business authority
A blog with rich and educative content achieves business authority fast. For example, HubSpot, over the years, has grown to be a go-to blog to learn inbound content marketing practices. Backlinko is also authoritative when it comes to learning SEO and link building.
Achieving backlinks, comments, and lots of social engagement on your blog is not a walk in the park. Your blog has to be exceptional.
When your blog is up there, you will enjoy privileges that a few businesses enjoy, such as increased organic traffic, which increases leads and sales.
Blogging is fun if you like solving challenges your audience faces. Go all-in with a mindset of helping solve problems and notice how traffic increases automatically.
Otherwise, you will barely move the needle if you focus on boosting traffic and not conversion.
Do you think HubSpot or Backlinko focuses on traffic? No. their target is achieving business authority.
To get to that level, they had to create unique and resourceful content. With authority comes leads and business growth.
3. Builds and maintain a strong relationship with your audience
Without a good relationship with your audience, you will not achieve conversions and hence no business growth.
How does a blog help you to do that?
Well, with relevant content on your blog, customers will learn to trust you since you are helping them, as well. They will comment on your blog posts, like, and share them with their friends.
In the process, they will develop trust and a stronger relationship with you. Customers only buy from people they trust.
Most businesses make these mistakes when it comes to blogging
Are you getting the benefits above from your blog? If not, likely, you are not keen on some blogging rules. Here is where most businesses go wrong when it comes to business blogging:
- They focus on the “we” instead of the “you.”
The primary blogging focus is your customer. Therefore, you should direct all your blogging efforts to attract, engage, and delight them.
I have visited some sites that talk about themselves a lot. Most of these sites want to position themselves as experts in the eyes of the customer, but they are doing it wrong.
You see, the customer does not care about you. He has his share of challenges. What he needs is someone who can tell him, “this is how to make money from your blog,” or “this is how to make your day productive.”
Hence, a good business blog content taps into the emotions of the readers, engage them, and provide a solution. Emotional marketing is the most potent form of marketing because it brings forth more reliable connections.
- They don’t collect data first
Without data, you will not know how to make profitable business decisions. Supposed you want to do something, for example, beginning a luxurious car hire business, can you do it without collecting data first?
Of course, you can’t; that’s jumping the gun.
However, with enough business data, you can make better fact-based decisions and scale fast. Most top companies, such as Facebook and Google, spend billions collecting and analyzing data.
Therefore, data is crucial when you want to begin a profitable business blogging. But how do you collect data?
The kind of data to collect should be related to the solutions you want to bring to the blogosphere. Hence, you need to know how many customers are searching for the answers you have in mind.
Since your prospects use search terms when looking for solutions on search engines, look up those keywords. Target profitable keywords with low to medium competition.
- They are not consistent
Once you have data, the next step is to create unique and relevant content. You need to be consistent, though, to achieve significant results.
You can’t build an authoritative business blog if you update your blog posts once per month. It should be a regular activity because Google likes fresh content.
Research shows that companies that publish at least 16 blog posts or more per month get 3.5 times more organic traffic than businesses that publish less than 5 blog posts per month.
Therefore, consistency is critical in blogging. But how do you maintain consistency? Well, you need a content strategy. It will give you a framework of what to do and keeps you on track.
Conclusion
Do you have a business blog? Understand its impact on business growth and begin blogging effectively. Blogging is free. So, it can’t cost you much to create a blog today, and contact me to craft a winning content plan for your business.