Why Businesses Need to Blog
If you’re a business that wants to have staying power, you need a blog. Blogs allow you to have an ongoing dialogue with your audience while keeping your website and social media platforms active. For a blog to work, though, you need to be consistent and to stick to it. When you do blog and blog consistently, the payoff is tremendous.
Blogs Let Audiences Get to Know the Real You
Let us assume that you have a clear brand identity and voice. You have social media accounts and a perfect website. Why do you need to blog? Even with the perfect online presence, you still need to blog because a blog lets your audience get to know you. Your website and social media platforms exist to facilitate business. You want people to go to your website to purchase a good or services. You want them to use your social media posts to take action whether it’s going to your website or making a purchase.
Using a blog to reach your audience is like sitting down and having a cup of coffee with them. Photo credit: Danielle Macinnes
These aren’t tools for getting to know you. Your blog, however, allows that. In your blog, you can explain your service or product in a way that shows audiences how what you do can genuinely and can positively impact their lives. Blogs give you the space to tell your story in such a way that takes the pressure off the audience. Blogs allow your audience to not only get to know but also to feel like they are making the choice to commit to doing business with you at their pace.
Blogs Give You Content for Your Social Media Pages & Your Newsletter
Continuing on audience reach and social media, you can share your blog on your social media page, which adds to the type(s) of content that you share on social media. You want a heathy balance of content. Certainly, you want to be useful and to share news related to your brand that will entertain or inform your audience, but you also want to have content that will draw your audience back to your website.
Blog posts do just that. They add to the diversity of content that you share on your social media page(s) while also drawing your audience back to your website.
Additionally, your blog posts also make great content for your weekly, biweekly, or monthly newsletter. A roundup of blog posts helps those who may have missed you on social media or who don’t routinely swing by your website remember who you are and how much value you add to their lives.
Your blog gives your website momentum, which allows you to engage with your existing audience and to reach new audiences. Photo credit: Emma Matthews
Blogs Keep Your Website from Being Static
When people do click your blog link from a Google search, social media, or the newsletter, it adds to your website’s traffic. Blogs can boost your website’s traffic. Most websites are not high-traffic zones. In other words, they are not spaces like say, Target.com, where people frequently visit in order to make purchases. Most audiences visit websites either when they need a good or service or when they are compelled by that site’s content. Blogs compel audiences to visit your site in a natural way.
Blogs Boost Your Search Engine Rankings
When audiences are compelled to visit your site, not only are they keeping it from being static, but they are also telling search engine algorithms that your site is useful and relevant for certain search terms. Thus, your blog makes it easier for new and existing audiences to find your website. If your blog leads to good search rankings, then you are more likely to draw new audiences and therefore, new customers. Fresh, new content on your site on a regular basis is the best way to build site cred in the eyes of the great and powerful Google. And the easiest and most natural way to accomplish that regular posting of content? Blogs. You’re not just blogging because your audience is reading it. You’re blogging because the search engines are reading it. Need a good example? Our website gets more than 7,000 unique visitors each and every month and 85% of that traffic is going to one particular blog post on our website…and it’s a blog post that’s over 2 years old! Can you guess which one it is?
To put plainly, a solid blog strategy, one in which you post on a consistent basis, will improve your relationship with your existing audience and will increase the chances that new audiences will find you and will want to do business with you. Thus, every business can benefit from having a blog.
In the great race to serve your audience, blogs are a marathon, not a sprint. Over the long-term, they improve your ability to relate with audiences on your website, social media, and your newsletter. If you aren’t sure how to blog or what to write about in your blog, click here to contact us, The Storyteller Agency. That’s what we’re here for—to help you grow your business and to connect with your audience with simple, inexpensive tools like blogs.
