Every business should be blogging
Blogging. Blogs. Blog. What is a blog? Blogs are online journals or informational websites displaying information in reverse chronological order. Blogs are articles that you publish on your business’ website. Blogs can be about your business, what you do, your business processes, what you sell, your announcements, and your plans. Blogs can be posted as often as you want, and they’re great for speaking directly to your customers, as well as for finding new people to inform about your business. Blog about your location and where you operate. You can really blog about whatever, as long as it is relevant to your business. All you need is a website, and most website platforms have blogging built in.
Simply put, blogging will increase traffic to your business’ website. By publishing regular blog posts, you are creating new information rich webpages for search engine to index, and if your blog posts are relevant to your business, search engines will reward you with traffic. Search engines “scan” the entire Internet often, mapping out domains and keeping track of website quality. Blog posts are pages that people like to click on when using search engines, as they generally answer a question, explain something, give a how-to, or announce news. By keeping your blog posts high quality, search engines will notice when people stay on your website and re-visit it. These are indicators that search engines use when deciding who to rank at the top of a search page.
Your business can blog as much as you’re able to, and anything helps. You can blog every once in a while, and it’ll still grow the amount of you business’ website pages indexed by search engines. Blogging more frequently is rewarded with more traffic because search engines will begin to consider your business’ website to be a good source of information that they can rely on to send traffic to. As reported by Oberlo, “Businesses that produce 16 or more blog posts per month experience 3.5 times more traffic than blogs that post fewer than four posts.”
Blogging is a common practice in big business that can easily be adopted by any small business, nonprofit, artist or organization. Brands often announce product launches on their own company blogs, and companies like Facebook use blogging to inform their business customers on how to use Facebook for business and announce new ways to advertise. These companies use content marketing because it works, and is an effective means of corporate communication. According to Oberlo, “86% of content marketers use blogs as part of their marketing strategy.”
Not only does blogging give you the ability to speak directly to your customers, maintaining a regular blog for your business is an excellent way to find new customers organically when people search online. When blogging, use phrases that people may be searching when making purchasing decisions. If you provide a service to a local area, be sure to mention the specific towns that you provide service for, and when someone searches for that service you provide along with their town, you’ll start to show in results the more you blog and mention that phrase. If you’re a pizzeria in the northwest Chicago suburbs, write blog posts including your service and location, like “pizza delivery in NW Chicago suburbs."
When search engines think of your business’ website as a good source of information, they will send relevant local traffic to it. This new traffic consists of people who are searching real questions on search engines, and are actually curious about the topic since they made the search (as opposed to being served an ad). If your website provides good information and is easy enough to navigate, people who find your website via search can become new customers. Again, Oberlo published in a study, “55% of marketers gained new customers because of blogging.”
Blogging is free and easy to do. Start by writing about what your business does. Write about your industry and how these things are relevant to the area in which you serve. Post your blog posts onto your social media accounts, like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and your existing customers will be able to start reading your posts right away. As you post on you blog, keep posting them to social media, and you’ll begin to get even more traffic. Blogging is the best free way to build your business’ brand and communicate to new and existing customers. What will your first post be?
