Five reasons your business needs a blog
No matter what industry you’re in or how long your business has been going, if you have a website there’s a lot to be gained from regularly publishing blogs.
Type ‘why should I blog for my business?’ into Google and you’ll be met with a whole bunch of statistics that prove how powerful blogs can be as an addition to your marketing strategy. Like this one from Hubspot:
Companies that blog get 55% more website visitors than those that don’t.
That’s a pretty hard-to-ignore stat for any business owner who wants to drive more traffic to their website. (So that’s every business owner, then!)
If you need more reasons to get blogging, here are my top five:
1. Blogs Optimise Your Website for Search Engines
Search engines love websites that are regularly updated with fresh, original content, and blogs are a brilliant way of achieving this.
Every time you add a new page to your website, you boost your chances of your content being found and indexed by search engines, and therefore being returned in search results for relevant terms.
In fact, to quote a Hubspot stat again:
Blogs can result in a 434% increase in indexed pages.
There are also a number of on-page SEO tactics you can use when writing your blog to improve its visibility and chances of driving targeted, relevant traffic to your website. These include title tags, meta descriptions, keywords and URL structure – watch this space for a separate article on optimising your blogs.
2. Blogs Build Connections with Your Customers
Blog writing is much less restricted by rules and word counts than other forms of marketing copy, which makes them a great opportunity to exercise your brand voice, show your personality and even have some fun.
For small businesses in particular, blogs can be a great tool for giving customers an insight into the story behind the business, your passion for what you do and your journey so far. All of this is a brilliant way of engaging people and building emotional connections by showing a persona that they get to know, like and trust.
You can also use your blog to speak to your audience about issues you know they’ll connect with. For example, if you’re selling vegan-friendly beauty products and your ideal customers are people who love make-up but want a cleaner, greener approach, you could focus your blogging efforts on articles that give tips for reducing plastic waste, educate on alternatives to toxic chemicals or deliver your opinion on current environmental issues. This also helps to establish your voice as an expert in your field, building your credibility and, again, inspiring trust.
3. Blogs Create an Ever-Growing Bank of Content
Another brilliant thing about regularly blogging for your business is that you have an ever-growing bank of content you can dip into and repurpose for other marketing activities.
For example, snippets from blogs can be turned into posts for social media and email newsletters, and existing blogs can be used to generate ideas for new articles on related themes. You can also gather some powerful ‘social proof’ via your blogs if you encourage your readers to interact by adding comments or sharing your article on their own social media accounts.
4. Blogs Can Increase Dwell Time
Once you get that targeted traffic to your website you want to inspire those people to browse other content. Remember, the longer they spend on your site the more likely they are to engage with your brand and become a customer.
The great thing about blogs is that you can incorporate internal links to gently signpost readers to other content they might find appealing – directing them towards product collections, for example, or other articles on similar topics.
5. Blogs Are Inexpensive
If you’re writing your blogs yourself, it’s really just a question of the time it takes you to write and upload them. You’ll find sources of free photography online (I love Unsplash) so you can add engaging visuals to your piece, and your website template probably already has built-in blog pages you can use without any additional cost.
That said, many business owners have a hundred-and-one plates spinning at any one time, so I know that adding regular blogging to the list can seem like a daunting prospect. If that’s the case, you could consider hiring a freelance copywriter (like me!) to write your blogs for you. A good copywriter will be able to create compelling, SEO-friendly articles with relatively little input from you, so it needn’t become a huge drain on your time. And you’ll definitely find that the cost of the copywriter is massively outweighed by the positive impact the blogs have for your business.
If you want to add blogs to your marketing strategy but are struggling to find the words or the time, I can help with a one-off piece or a monthly package to give you a steady flow of original blogs for your business.
Get in touch and let’s talk blogs!