Many businesses understand blogging is a crucial activity for their inbound marketing activities. Yet they don’t understand why it is important. Countless research projects have shown blogging has many benefits which include the following five reasons to blog:
1. Creates Inbound Links
Businesses that blog receive nearly double the amount of inbound links (97%). This can support your traffic by attracting customers from sites with similar themes and by raising your rank slightly on Google and other search engines.
2. Encourages Traffic
You can expect your website traffic to increase 48% once you have exceeded 50 website pages. One of the easiest ways to do this is to blog regularly. Two blog posts per week can help you reach that milestone within six months.
3. Generates Leads
Higher traffic doesn’t disappear from your website. Traffic generates more leads and sales. Companies who publish two articles per week double their leads compared to those who publish one article per week. However, pushing the number of articles to four per week will increase lead generation by 500%.
4. Builds Trust
Content marketing is about convincing your target audience you are the best person to deliver them a solution to a problem. For this you need to build a relationship based on trust. Blogging is by far one of the most effective methods with 81% of customers trusting information published on a blog.
5. A Blog Inspires Purchases
Stimulating blog content can be made to encourage visitors to make a purchase. 61% of internet users have admitted they have made a purchase based on information or recommendations on a blog.
These five reasons demonstrate blogging is necessary. However, many businesses tend to abandon their blog or use their blog only when it is convenient. This can result in a sporadically updated blog and poor results.
Research has shown this lowers the trust customers have in the brand. This could be because the customers feel an unloved blog will relate to poor customer communications.
To avoid this, integrate these following thoughts and processes into your content marketing campaign, to create an excellent blogging platform and expand the reach of your brand online.
Create a schedule commitment so you know when to write, edit and publish content. Write the schedule on a wall calendar or set reminder messages into your computer, tablet or phone to ensure you keep up with the content creation steps.
Design a production process to ensure your blog posts are of high quality. Blog posts aren’t simply about writing the content, you need to develop ideas, conduct research, write the content, edit it and then publish. This is a lot of time and without the proper process in place, blogs can fall apart.
Get ahead of the schedule by creating the blog content for the next two or three weeks (at a minimum) in advance. You can achieve this by delaying the start of your blog and creating the content first. This ensures that should you become too busy you always have content to publish.
Know what your audience wants by listening to the questions they ask you and conducting market research. The questions and problems they are presenting will be perfect topics for your blog.
Conclusion
Blogging is one of the best methods you have for reaching your customers. With up to 75% of your traffic being generated from search engines and blogs able to contribute significantly to your search rank – there is no reason not to start blogging. If you can blog 15 times or more per month you will see a sharp increase in your traffic, leads and sales which will build on your business’ success.