The Complete Guide to Blogging for Business

In the beginning, blogs were a medium people used to feature their personal stories and experiences in journal-like log entries. Today, blogs can be used for the same purpose, but they are also used by businesses for a variety of different reasons.

The typical blog is made up of a series of individual blog posts that dive into various sub-topics relating to your blog’s main subject. Through these posts, you can incorporate a range of keywords that help your site’s pages rank higher on search engines. That way, more people will see your content and increase your chances of developing solid leads.

Additionally, by frequently updating your blog with fresh topics, you’re able to engage with your audience and analyze which content types they respond best to, which they share across social media platforms more often, and even discuss various ideas with them through comment functions.

So let’s dive into seven of the biggest reasons you need to start blogging for your business today, and a few key ways you can implement each one into your blogging strategy moving forward.

Why You Need to Blog for Your Business

Blogging for your business is incredibly valuable. It helps you gain more traffic, grow your social media accounts, convert your traffic into viable leads, produce long-term results, build backlinks, and so much more. Let’s dive into each of these blogging benefits to better understand how each works and how you can incorporate relevant functions into your own pages.

Blogging Drives Traffic to Your Website

Everyone wants more traffic on their website. The more traffic you have, the more potential you have to make impressions on individuals and convert them into viable leads who not only become loyal customers but who also promote your brand to others.

There are several ways people traditionally find your website.

• If the individual already knows something about your brand, they can go ahead and look you up by typing your website or company name in their browsers. Of course, to have potential leads find you this way, you have to rely on them finding out about your brand through online promotions, friend recommendations, or any number of other questionably reliable sources.
  
• You could shell out the big bucks and pay for traffic to be directed to your site by purchasing an email list and hoping that your target audience members are the ones who get the emails. Then, you have to cross your fingers that they’ll open the email and visit your site instead of sending it straight to their junk folders. And if that’s not enough reasons to avoid this method of traffic generation, you should probably keep in mind that buying these kinds of email lists to spam is also very illegal.
  
• If you want to legally purchase access to more traffic, you can run a series of paid ads, but keep in mind that this method can be incredibly expensive. Additionally, it’s a very short-term option. Traffic generated from paid advertisements can only be directed to your site through those ads. Once you stop paying the costly ad fees, your traffic stops rolling in as well.

Fortunately, there is a cheap, legal way you can draw traffic in and keep them coming for a long time: by optimizing your site for search engines.

If you’re like the majority of online businesses, your website doesn’t have a huge amount of pages, and you rarely update them. But by keeping up with a blog that you consistently update, you can add another indexed page to your website and increase your opportunities for ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Page Results) which drives traffic to your website organically.

Blog Content Can Grow Your Social Media Engagement

Social media is a fantastic tool for engaging new and existing audiences. It’s a place where people share content from all over the world, and then interact with it by liking, commenting, and resharing it. Blogs are one type of content that can easily be spread across social media. 

Among the hassles of running a successful business, maintaining a strong social media presence, and striving for a healthy work/life balance, adding yet another task to your plate may seem incredibly inadvisable. But by keeping up an active blog, you automatically generate new content for social media with every post. 

If you write a blog post on your industry’s top trends for the year, instead of having to turn around and create relevant content for social media, you can use your new post for the material. Grab three or four key points from your blog post, and you have everything you need for a great social media post.

Use those key points to create aesthetic post images you can share on Instagram, Facebook. Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any number of other social media platforms you engage with. What’s more, you don’t have to stick with sharing key points–you can share statistical graphics, partnership highlights, or anything else you can think of with minimal effort.

Image Sources: WriterArmy Instagram Page

When you share your blog content on social media, you end up strengthening your social media presence with well-researched blog content, and you drive new website visitors to your blog via social media. And the more you blog, the more chances you have to go viral on social media. Each one benefits the other, and as a bonus, you get to reduce your overall workload.

Blogs Help Convert Your Traffic into Real Leads

When your social media accounts and blog posts are working together to drive more traffic to your website, the next step is to focus on turning those potential customers into viable leads. 

Every time you publish a new post, it’s a new opportunity for you to generate leads by incorporating specific CTAs (Call to Action). These CTAs prompt people to exchange their information including their names and email addresses in exchange for some kind of freebie. 

Typically these freebies come in one of the following forms:

• eBooks
• Whitepapers
• Fact Sheets
• Webinars
• Trials
• Newsletters

Essentially, you can convert your traffic into leads in four simple steps:

1. An individual visits your website
2. They see a CTA with a freebie
3. They click on the CTA and are sent to a page where they can input their information in a simple form
4. They fill out the form, submit their information, and get the freebie

Sure, there’s no guarantee that everyone who visits your site will click on your CTA button and become a converted lead. But the more you incorporate CTAs into your blog posts, the better your lead-conversion chances will be.

Blogging Establishes You as an Industry Authority

Blogging requires that you consistently create and share valuable content and articles that answer common questions your readers and customers have. And the more questions you provide answers to, the more you’ll become an industry leader and authority in the eyes of your audience.

Establishing your authority online isn’t just about patting yourself on the back and snubbing your competitors with your superiority. It’s a valuable, recognized method of convincing leads of your trustworthiness as a business.

When individuals find answers to their questions on your site, they’re much more likely to trust you guiding them through your sales funnel. Additionally, because they’ve already been exposed to your content, they will likely have significantly more knowledge of your products, services, marketplace, and industry than others might have. This makes having productive sales conversations so much easier.

A few key ways you can work to establish your authority within your industry include:

• Staying on-topic with niche-specific blog posts
• Providing genuine value to your audience
• Being consistent across all of your platforms and posts
• Building relationships with industry professionals, experts, and influencers
• Engaging with your community regularly

Blogging Builds Better Backlinks

Backlinks are an essential part of your Google ranking success. Many experts believe it’s the third most important factor when it comes to determining your search engine optimization.

Simply put, backlinks–also known as inbound links–are links found on other websites that link back to your content. They not only increase your search engine rankings but also help build your domain authority and further help establish you as an authority in your industry. 

Unfortunately, backlinks are one of the most challenging SEO tools to generate. They rely on outside sites valuing your content enough to share links on their pages, then on individual page visitors clicking on those links to get to your site. The best way you can help generate more backlinks for yourself is by consistently publishing quality content.

Blogging Humanizes Your Business

Blogging gives you an easily-accessible medium to share your company news and stories with your staff in addition to your wider customer audience. This helps you increase company news and brand awareness that can humanize your business.

A few ways you can increase personal connections between your blog, employees, and readers is by featuring key stories including:

• Share a post on the new staff member you hired
• Publish a blog about industry experts you recently interviewed
• Feature case studies
• Show audiences behind-the-scenes moments
• Advertise local fairs and trade shows you’re participating in

When your business shares this kind of content, it demonstrates that it’s about more than selling products or services. You show the human side of your business–the people behind the curtain and those who you value. This allows you to develop a deeper connection with your audience which can help you build better relationships with them. 

Sharing content that reflects real human experiences can work to generate more positive interactions and associations between you and your audience while engendering a deeper sense of trust that can lead to more lead generation, CTA responses, and traffic in the long run.

Blogging Produces Long-Term Results

Business blogging is an extremely scalable venture that produces long-term results. 

When you first publish a blog, it may gain a decent amount of views and leads in the first few days, but that growth and viewership will typically die down within a short period. But that doesn’t mean your post has stalled out.

Instead, because your post is ranking, it will continue to generate traffic and leads for days, weeks, months, and even years after it goes live. So while it may be discouraging to see your traffic stall out after the first few days, keep in mind that your blog is still working for you.

While you’re walking your dog, adventuring halfway around the world, or playing a perfect golf game, the blog posts you published last week can steadily turn into hundreds and thousands of views and leads that keep on rolling into the future.

Additionally, you can use this traction to monetize your blog content in any number of creative ways. You can use affiliate marketing strategies, for example, to generate income by sharing links to products you talk about on your blog.

Keep in mind that your oldest blogs are going to be working hardest for you to bring in sales and leads. These posts, known as “compounding posts,” make up a tenth of all of your blog posts, and they can bring in as much as 38% of your total blog traffic. So even if you don’t see immediate results, know that traffic for your page is mathematically predictable, and it only keeps growing after you hit “publish.”

Key Takeaways

Blogging for your business is an invaluable tool, but you need to keep in mind that with blogging you’re playing the long game. Once you’ve published a post, you don’t have to do much work to get it to rank well, but you do need to be patient and trust the process.

If you follow all the right steps by optimizing your page with the right SEO keywords and phrases, sharing post content to social media, and consistently maintaining a high standard of quality, within time, you’ll become a trusted industry expert and your blog will have everything it needs to achieve long-term success.