5 Ways a Blog Can Help Your Business Grow
“Blogging is crucial to building your business.” You’ve heard this sentence over and over again and now you have finally decided to start a blog.
Indeed, running a blog can have an incredible impact on your business. As much as 47% of consumers view three to five pieces of content before they actually make a buying decision.
Numbers don’t lie and nor do content marketing experts when they say that blogging is a cornerstone of their content marketing strategies.
Below are listed the five reasons why building an authority blog should be on your list of priorities for growing your business.
Builds your brand
From the dawn of civilization, people have been listening to stories. It’s simply in our genes and you can’t really do much about it. However, you can use this to your advantage and capitalize on your blog in order to create a successful brand.
Blogging is a great way to add a personal touch to your business. Here is how a blog that creates value can support your branding efforts:
– It communicates the uniqueness of your business.
All brands want to be unique but they don’t truly understand what they need to give in return. Your blog tells your story and shows the personal side of your business that sets it apart from your competitors.
– It creates value for your target market.
When you create value for your audience, you show that you care about them. Use your blog to create valuable, relevant, and meaningful content to help your customers solve their day-to-day challenges.
– It builds brand awareness and exposure.
Coupled with a good SEO strategy, a blog can help you get a high level of brand awareness and exposure, driving traffic to your website.
Which leads us to the next point.
Supports your SEO
Search engine optimization can improve your website’s visibility but only if done right. In other words, optimizing nothing but your main web pages for industry-relevant keywords will not be enough.
Therefore, as you add more content to your website and optimize it for search engines, more pages from your website will be indexed, improving your organic search visibility and boosting your website traffic.
Enter blog.
Regular blog posts are the perfect way to always add new, quality, and optimized content to your website and give search engines a good reason to rank your website higher.
Bottom line, blogging is great for SEO and here is why:
– It keeps your website fresh.
Google and other search engines want to deliver the most up-to-date information on every single topic. When you regularly update your blog, you send signals to search engines that you constantly offer fresh content.
In addition, this gives search engine algorithms more reasons to index your website more frequently and keep it on their radar.
– It keeps people on your website.
Think about it. If you have valuable content to offer, your website visitors will have a reason to stay on your website for longer.
In other words, a quality blog will reduce your bounce rate. However, in order to reduce your bounce rate, you also need to optimize your website and blog.
In brief, make sure that your pages load fast and your blog does not spam your visitors with ads. Moreover, publish content that is relevant, easy to read, authoritative, and fresh. Finally, invite your readers to visit other blog posts by interlinking your content.
Builds your business’ authority
Just like your blog helps you connect with your audience and build trust and a stronger relationship with them, it also offers one of the best ways for your brand to position itself as an authority in its industry.
When you start a business, think of your blog as a place where you can share essential industry-related information and insights. Building authority means that you will breed long-term trust and familiarity as well as always be the go-to business for customers in your industry.
Furthermore, quality content will get you those backlinks you have been dreaming of for such a long time. As a matter of fact, running a blog will help you increase your chances of getting backlinks by as much as 97%.
However, building authority requires that you:
– publish quality and original content on a regular basis
– connect with your readers on a deeper level
– promote content on social media and other platforms
– engage in guest blogging in order to expand your audience
Increases conversions and sales
Businesses that blog regularly see their brand loyalty increase, which further leads to a significantly higher ROI.
If you think your conversions and sales are lagging behind, then a blog may be just what you need to get them back on track. However, if your blog does not encourage your readers to convert, they won’t do it on their own.
For that reason, you need to use gated content wisely and spark interest in your readers so that they want to learn more. When you entice curiosity in them, they will give you their email in exchange for the gated content and voila! They have just converted into your email subscribers.
However, in order for your readers to convert, your blog needs to have a strong call to action incorporated in your blog posts. In other words, your CTA has to be action-oriented, benefit-driven, persuasive, visual, and it should also create a sense of urgency.
Once you have created your call to action, you also need to find the best way to place it in your blog. Here are some of the most common CTA locations:
– top of the page
– end of the post
– in the sidebar
– within the post
– as a pop-up (sliding, floating, or scrolling)
– as a full-screen overlay
However, don’t overdo it and place your call to action in all these places as this would be counterproductive and make your readers bounce. Instead, use two to three call to actions in each post, test different options, and use what works best.
Makes you money
Finally, be honest and admit to yourself that your ultimate business goal is to make money. And that is perfectly fine because, after all, that is the goal of every business in the world.
But how can you actually make money blogging? Take a look at the examples below.
– Create online courses, workshops, and ebooks.
These three types of content are a great way to build on your blog by offering more valuable content to your readers. However, this time it won’t be for free.
In addition, online courses, workshops, and ebooks are also great because they create an exclusive feeling for those who get to attend or read them.
– Go for affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is still one of the best ways to earn a passive income from your blog. The best part is that if you manage to build an authority blog, you can actually make money promoting products and services that you like anyway.
– Call it a day.
Lastly, if your blog becomes an authority in your industry, there will be a lot of people wanting to buy your website. In that case, you can simply sell your website and retire or start another blog and do it all over again.