Running a business without blogging is like fishing without bait – it can be done but would be incredibly difficult.
Investing in the creation of high-quality and engaging content will help differentiate your company from the competition, build awareness, generate leads and ultimately, increase sales.
More specifically, check out these stats:
- 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day acquired a customer.
- Businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth.
- Blogging 16-20 times a month has earned businesses twice as much traffic—more than those businesses that blog 4 times a month or less.
[DON’T HAVE A BLOG YET? LEARN HOW TO START A BLOG IN UNDER 5 MINUTES]
In this blog post, I’ll highlight 5 simple ways blogging will benefit your business…
1) Drive Relevant Traffic to Your Website
Your blog is a great place to have ungated content that gives website visitors more of a reason to stick around longer and to also share out your content with their network as well.
Two must-use avenues to share out your content are social media and SEO. The more relevant eyeballs you can get to your content, the better it will be for you. (See my post on How to Execute Your Content Distribution Strategy Like a Boss).
From an SEO perspective, you can increase your rankings, which will help with website traffic. A key point to note here is that though it is important to ensure your content is optimized for search engines, you need to put your target audience’s needs first.
Writing content that adds value to your target audience will help with gaining new subscribers that can be nurtured into sales, and drive retention for upsell opportunities.
2) Actionable Copy
Have a purpose behind every blog post you write and publish. Put in the time to research long-tail keywords, popular key phrases, and topics within your niche. There’s no sense in covering a topic that doesn’t align with your business objectives.
More specifically, make sure you position your products/services within the blog posts. Here are a couple of examples to help give you ideas:
Once you land on the Problogger blog, this pop-up slides down with a clear CTA (call to action).
Neil Patel’s blog is filled with long-form content and multiple CTAs to sign up for his online training.
3) Shorten the Sales Cycle
The key to successfully aligning your blogging efforts with sales is to provide helpful content that covers topics your target customers need help with. Doing so builds trust and will add to the bottom line as time continues.
From there, make sure you are pushing to get subscribers and to cross-promote other content pieces you are publishing (e.g. guides, checklists, datasheets, webinars, etc.).
Check out this example on HubSpot’s blog as they promote the following eBook within a blog post along with ease of becoming a subscriber:
Once you collect enough email addresses, you can then start to segment your subscribers by their readiness to buy from you. Knowing where each subscriber is in the buyer journey will also help you develop more blog posts that fit their lifecycle stage.
[GET YOUR BLOG UP AND RUNNING WITH THIS SIMPLE TUTORIAL]
4) Sustain Long-Term Results
Once your blog posts start to get indexed and ranked, the ability to continually get organic traffic sticks around in the longer-term.
Pay attention to your analytics to see which blog posts continue to gain momentum over time because this will be a great indication of which topics are resonating most with your target customers.
Other ways you can leverage these ‘compounding’ posts to your advantage is to turn them into longer-form content pieces such an eBook and webinar. Doing so will also give you more ways to continue sharing out the content on your end as well.
5) Show Don’t Just Tell
Go beyond just text-based blog posts. This means publishing visual pieces such as infographics and videos. Having visual content not only helps drive more engagement but helps drive proliferation.
Here are a few stats to take into consideration:
- 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business, second only to blogging (38%).
- When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.
- 4X as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it.
Final Thoughts
To make blogging work for you, your perception of it must fall in line with that fact that the journey will be a marathon, not a sprint. Your hard work will pay off with building awareness, generating leads and sales but you must be consistent. Right out of the gate, consider putting together a committed content calendar to pump out new content every week or every month.
Related Posts:
3 Responses