As a business owner, you’ve likely heard from various sources that you need to be blogging. This leads to the obvious questions: Why? What’s a blog going to do for me?
Not to mention the common feedback we hear, which is, “I don’t have time to blog!”
Here are the reasons why you need a blog, a way to outsource your blog internally, and a blogging success story from a real business owner.
The data proves blogging’s value
Your site traffic increases dramatically with regular blogging. Thanks to Steamfeed we’ve got some amazing data to show you.
As the chart below shows, there’s a nice spike in traffic for sites that publish at least three times per month. But don’t stop there! Look at the traffic for sites that blog 15 times per month – there’s gold in those hills.
Now that we’ve got your attention, let’s take a step back and look at what a blog is, how those spikes in traffic occur, and what other benefits are for blogging.
What a blog is
Your blog is your outreach point for engaging with visitors and helping them with their questions. By having this channel available, you build trust with your site visitors. Think of it as your digital customer service point.
Think about the common questions you get from prospects and customers. Those very questions make great topics for blog posts.
You might push back and say your knowledge is too valuable to be giving away, but the truth is, in the information age we live in, consumers are craving trustworthy sources of information they can connect with. That trust ultimately translates into dollars because people want to do business with people they know, like, and trust.
Search engines love blogs
It’s great to be helping people, but we all know you’ve got to impress the search engines to get top ranking. A well-designed and coded site is part of this, along with about 200 other variables search engines look at. One of those variables is fresh content.
Search engines don’t look kindly on a site that just sits there getting stale. They want to see fresh content because it’s a sign that you, the site owner, are continually posting new content to help consumers. A blog is the way you achieve this.
Even more benefits of blogging
Here are more reasons to be blogging:
- When people sign up to receive your blog updates, you capture their email addresses. Those addresses can go into your database so you can market to them later.
- A blog increases your site’s page count. Search engines like to see lots of pages and deep site content, not just the same old 10 pages that are always there.
- You’re creating content to share in your social channels. No more “I wonder what I’ll tweet about today…” situations.
- Your employees can shoulder some of the workload for your blog (see, it’s not all on you). They’re likely good sources of helpful information for the blog because they are on the front lines. This benefits them, and your company, because they’re thinking like marketers now.
Real, live blogging proof
Marcus Sheridan of River Pools and Spas in Virginia is living proof that a blog helped him grow his pool business, even during a recession: Blogging increased his site’s traffic by 300%!
Here’s a brief interview with Marcus.
Conclusion
It’s time to drop the excuses for not blogging and start thinking about getting busy with your blog.
You don’t need to be a certified wordsmith to do this, either.
The best content is authentic content that helps people, and there are plenty of capable editors out there that can clean up your grammar and spelling. In fact, you’ve probably got one in your office right now.
We want to hear from you. Why aren’t you blogging?