Does your business have a blog? Does it update it regularly with quality content?

If the answer to either of these questions is no then you really should read on.

Having a well executed blog brings a heap of benefits to your business. 

SEO & Traffic Driving

There’s a lot written on the way Google and Bing search algorithims work so I won’t bore you with the detail of how it all works. What I can tell you is that Search Engines love it when you create content, an active website ranks higher than one that never has anything new on it. If you properly SEO your blog posts then you should see yourself gaining organic traffic from them. External and internal links fuel your SEO, more content with quality links helps to keep your pages ranking on Search Engines.

Social Media

Blog articles are a great way to get shared on Social Media. Having a blog also gives you access to a big, relevant library of content to use on your Social Media accounts. People are far more likely to share a blog post they found useful than they are one of your product pages. A strong Social Media presence helps people to trust in your business and if you keep them engaged you’ll stay at the forefront of their mind.

Social media is the 1 minute conversation you have to introduce your brand and your message. Your blog is where you can really show what you are about, the two go hand in hand. The two cross pollinate extremely well as we often post our blog articles to help answer people with questions on our Social Media, it saves time for us and the customer feels valued as they’re getting a tailored response as well as being shown the wealth of knowledge we already have available to them.

Showcase Your Knowledge

A blog gives your business a voice. By creating quality, useful content on a regular basis you show your customers that you know what you’re talking about. Try to answer the questions that customers want answered, give them the content they want. Your blog should be about your industry, your customers and their questions, problems and issues, not all about you! The blog is here to attract and nurture your customers, not to sell to them.

Consistent, high quality content helps to ensure the client knows that you commit that level of dedication to your work. By staying at the head of the game for a long time, with a public record of high quality content you lend authority to what you are saying. Even more so if your blog receives significant traffic.

Promote Discussion

One of the best ways to get insight into what your customers are thinking is to read through the comments on your blog articles or their related Social Media posts. Carefully follow any feedback you get and analyse what it means. Are there questions customers are asking that could form the basis of another blog post? Are there comments or questions to which you can reply to make the customer feel personally valued?

Blogs are also a great place to point customers with questions or worries. If there’s part of a process or product they don’t understand you can answer their query and give them a handful of helpful links to further reading that you’ve created in the past. This solidifies you as a font of knowledge and saves you time in the future.

Keeps You Ahead of The Game

If you’re spending a few hours a week working on a blog then you’ll need to know everything there is to know about your industry. Hopefully the process of writing the blog should keep you up to date with all of the latest industry news. This means you can be quick to adapt to new trends or technologies. Even better, if you manage to set yourself up as a knowledgeable source on a new development you can see significant spikes in traffic and inbound links.

Once you get into the habit of following the industry news sources you can use tools like Pocket to save articles to read later. Just noting down interesting thoughts and questions throughout the day can really help when it comes time to write a blog. When I first started writing blogs I used to struggle to think of content ideas, now I have dozens of ideas all written down that I’ve thought of whilst doing other things.

Constantly writing about your industry and what you do also makes it that much easier to explain to clients. If you get used to writing different kinds of blogs you can also explain at different levels of complexity without too much difficulty.

Longevity

Once you write a blog article there’s no reason it can’t be around for as long as you want it to be. This is great for a few reasons. A big content library shows people that you’ve known what you’re talking about for a long time and helps to foster trust. Blog articles from years ago can still drive organic traffic to your site. Well written and properly SEO’d content can add value forever. If you create 200 blog posts a year and you can then rely on half of them to give you 10 new visitors a month going forward for next year that’s 1000 new visitors a month before anything else you do.

Outsource

Remember that you don’t have to create all of your content yourself. Many people have many talents, but writing content isn’t always one of them. We often find it’s a great way to lighten the load to ask each staff member to come up with one blog a week. When you need content quickly or are having difficulty creating quality content you can consider outsourcing to a professional copywriter. We’ve written a short guide on when it’s the right time to do just that here. 

15-ways

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