Five Great Reasons to Blog
There are plenty of blogs out there, but the truth is that most of them lack direction. For every successful blog (see Copyblogger or Marketing Pilgrim) there are a thousand more that never got past that first “Hello World!” post.
New blogs are started all the time, but without any clear purpose many fizzle out after only a few weeks. Abandoned, empty blogs lie strewn across the web.
Image credit: Johan Jönsson
If your company blog is one of them, or worse, never even managed to get off the drawing board, it might be time to take another look. Done properly, blogs can be amongst the most valuable assets available to a business.
5 Reasons Your Business Should be Blogging
Despite having been around for years and being used by some of the biggest, most respected brands in the world, blogs, in some quarters at least, still have a lingering reputation for being casual or unprofessional.
This outdated view should be dispelled by the explosion in the number of businesses using blogs to promote themselves and communicate with their most important stakeholders. If you think the humble blog is a casual, unprofessional medium that isn’t suitable for your company, consider these advantages:
- Boost Website Search Rankings
- Build Brand Recognition / Enhance Authority
- Interact with Customers
- Build Industry Links
- Generate Business Enquiries
1. Boost Website Search Rankings
As well as ranking well in its own right, a blog can be used in conjunction with SEO to increase the search engine ranking of your main website, helping you rank higher for more search phrases.
How? Create useful content that customers, other companies in your sector or related industries, and anyone else with an interest in your products or service will want to refer to.
Good content is rewarded with high quality, relevant links, improving the domain’s overall standing in the eyes of Google. Even if your blog is located on a separate domain, you can funnel the link juice back to your main site by linking back to it. A blog is also an effective way to populate your site with lots of fresh, unique content.
2. Build Brand Recognition / Enhance Authority
It can be difficult for small to mid-sized firms to gain recognition in circles other than those they regularly deal in. Through blogging it’s possible for firms to build a strong brand and a reputation as a specialist in their given field.
How? Produce regular, informative articles and comment on developments in your industry to become a “go to” source of knowledge.
The history of posts a blog will generate over months and years doesn’t just give the search engines something extra to crawl; it also builds credibility with potential customers. A publishing history sends out a big trust signal and gives your company the “they know what they’re talking about” factor in spades.
3. Interact with Customers
Blogs are a great opportunity to forge closer links with your customer base.
How? Allow your customers to get in on the action; enable commenting on your blog to let customers participate in the conversation.
Not only does this strengthen and develop the relationship between business and customers, you will also benefit from the additional content that the community is able to contribute.
4. Build Industry Links
Blogging encourages networking within industries. More businesses are seeing the value of sharing knowledge and building valuable relationships through blogs rather than fearing the competition.
How? Be generous with your links. Link out freely to other blogs in your field, comment on other company’s posts and, more often than not, what you give will be reciprocated.
The companies unwilling to participate with the “other guy” are the ones left out of the conversation and without the crucial industry relevant links needed to rank highly.
5. Generate Business Enquiries
Blogs are fantastic sales tools and can achieve great search engine rankings in their own right. For many competitive search phrases, blogs feature prominently on Google’s first page.
How? Ensure your blogging platform is search engine friendly – that is it can be easily crawled by the search engine spiders, uses properly structured URLs and allows H1/H2 tagging etc.
Once your blog has built up some authority it is often possible to pick up long-tail search engine traffic almost at will by carefully crafting your post titles to include the appropriate keywords.
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