Five Reasons To Blog

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.

Avoid Your Business Blog From Failing

Starting a business blog has never been easier with WordPress, Blogger, Joomla and others all available to help any aspiring blogger to get started.

However, maintaining a blogging is not easy and it is estimated most new bloggers will fail within 90 days.

There are a number of reasons for this including the following four:

 

1. The Business Blog Is Not Given Enough Time To Show Results

One of the biggest misconceptions most small businesses believe is that their business blog will automatically yield returns. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Consider blogging to be like an investment in your infrastructure. If you buy a new processing machine it is unlikely to make its cost back for at least a couple of months if not years. Most business leaders think blogging is free and therefore the returns should be almost instantaneous.

The truth is blogging is not free, even if you write the content yourself. The time you spend producing, publishing and promoting your blog post is valuable time which has a cost.

What you need to do is give your business blog time to collect authority. This could be between six to twelve months. It may seem like a long time, but companies who do this can expect to see 97% more inbound links and up to 500% more leads.

 

2. The Content Is Not Appealing To The Audience

Blogging is about distributing knowledge and solutions to your audience. Those businesses who use the platform to just promote themselves will often find their efforts are in vain.

Your visitors, when they first arrive, will not care about your business, products or news. They are there because they have a problem and they want a solution.

Tailor your content so that it is all about your customer. Discover what problems they are looking to solve and create posts based on the solutions. Customers who find your solutions effective will want to know more about your brand and this is when you can talk about your business.

 

3. Not Enough Time To Create The Content

This is one of the most common reasons why business blogs fail.

Business owners become too busy to sit down and write their posts. Business blogs which have content published sporadically can perform worse than having no blog at all. However, with the benefits of a blog so high, producing enough content is so important.

To avoid this there are two options: setup a schedule so you are always ahead of your blogging schedule or hire a professional blogger.

If you want to create the content yourself, you have to prepare posts in advance. This allows you to always have content ready to go, even when you are busy.

Hiring a professional blogger is not necessarily expensive and the amount of time and traffic they can generate will give you a significant return in the long run.

 

4. Lack Of Promotion

Your business blog is a content platform and while up to 75% of your traffic may come from search engines, you still need to promote your blog in other ways.

One particular group you need to promote to is your previous visitors. Research has shown 70% of your visitors will not return unless you sign them up to your email list.

Use social media and sign up visitors to your email lists to deliver visitors to your site.

 

Conclusion

Blogging is a perfect method to grow your business but you need to give it time to establish itself and work for you.

Utilise the best practices to create an excellent business blog and drive traffic to your site over the long period.