Benefits of Blogging for Businesses

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Kathy Hadley selfI am honored to have Kathy Hadley as my Guest Blogger today

Are you in business?

Do you think that blogging isn’t for you?

Well, guess again.

Every business can benefit from blogging, even offline businesses.

Here is why.

1) It helps drive traffic to your website.

Raise your hand if you want more website visitors. Yeah, me too. Everyone does!

Now think about the ways people find your website:

  • They could  type your name right in, but that’s an audience you already have. They know who you are, you’re on their radar, and that doesn’t help you get more 
  • You could pay for traffic by buying an email list (don’t you dare!), blasting them, and hoping some people open and click through on the emails. But that’s expensive, and, you know, illegal.
  • You could pay for traffic by placing paid search ads, which isn’t illegal, but still quite expensive. And the second you run out of money, your traffic stops coming, too.

So … how can you drive any traffic? In short: blogging, social media, and search engines (all of which can be accomplished by participating in The Ultra Blog Challenge).

Here’s how it works.

Think about how many pages there are on your website. Probably not a ton, right? And think about how often you update those webpages. Probably not that often, right? (How often can you really update your About Us page, you know?)

Well, blogging helps solve both of those problems.

Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website. It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published that they should surface.

Every new indexed page is one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines, and drive traffic to your website through organic search. We’ll get into more of the benefits of blogging on your SEO a bit later.

Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media, especially when part of a blog challenge like the Ultra Blog Challenge.

Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that people can share on social networks — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ — which helps expose your business to a new audience that doesn’t know you yet.

Blog content also helps keep your social media presence going — instead of asking your social media manager to come up with brand new original content for social media (or creating that content yourself), your blog can serve as that repository of content. You’re strengthening your social reach with blog content and driving new website visitors to your blog with your social channels. Quite a symbiotic relationship, if I do say so myself.

So, the first benefit of blogging? It helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that.

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2) It helps convert that traffic into leads.

Now that you have traffic coming to your website through your blog, you have an opportunity to convert that traffic into leads.

Just like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads. And the way this works is really simple: Just add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post.

Often, these calls-to-action are things like free ebooks, free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials … basically, any content asset that someone would be willing to exchange their information for. To be super-clear for anyone unfamiliar with how traffic-to-lead conversions work, it’s as simple as this:

  • Visitor comes to website
  • Visitor sees call-to-action button with a free offer behind it
  • Visitor clicks call-to-action button and gets to a landing page, which contains a form for them to fill in with their information
  • Visitor fills out form, submits information, and receives the free offer

If you scroll down in this post, you’ll see a call-to-action button. In fact, 99.9% of the posts we publish have call-to-action buttons … and yours should, too! That is how you turn that traffic coming to your blog into leads for your sales team.

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(Note: Not every reader of your blog will become a lead — and that’s okay! No one converts 100% of the people that read their blog into leads. Just get blogging, put calls-to-action on every post, set a visitor-to-lead conversion rate benchmark for yourselfand strive to improve that each month.)

3) It helps establish authority.

The best business blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes. This is a particularly handy tool for Sales and Service professionals.

Can you imagine the impact of sending an educational blog post you wrote to clear things up for a confused customer? Or how many more deals a salesperson could close if their leads discovered blog content written by their salesperson?

“Establishing authority” is a fluffy metric — certainly not as concrete as traffic and leads, but it’s pretty powerful stuff.

4) It drives long-term results.

You know what would be cool? If any of the following things helped you drive site traffic and generate new leads:

  • Trip to Hawaii
  • Going to the gym
  • Getting your hair blown out (amirite, ladies?)
  • Watching Game of Thrones
  • Sleeping

Good news! That’s what blogging does — largely through search engines. Here’s what I mean:

Let’s say you sit down for an hour and write and publish a blog post today. Let’s say that blog post gets you 100 views and 10 leads. You get another 50 views and 5 leads tomorrow as a few more people find it on social media and some of your subscribers get caught up on their email and RSS. But after a couple days, most of the fanfare from that post dies down and you’ve netted 150 views and 15 leads.

Only it’s not done.

That blog post is now ranking in search engines. That means for days, weeks, months, and years to come, you can continue to get traffic and leads from that blog post. So while you’re surfing in Hawaii, picking up your kid from school, and hitting your snooze alarm, you’re also driving traffic and leads. 

One hour of effort today can turn into hundreds of thousands of views and leads in the future.

(Fun Fact: About 70% of our traffic each month comes from posts that weren’t published that month. Whoa.)

There are other reasons businesses might want to blog, but I think they’re smaller and stray from the core benefits of blogging.

If you’re looking to start a business blog or get more investment for one you’ve already started, the reasons above are a great place to start arguing your case.

Kathy Hadley

And once you have a blog, you need to get those posts out to the world and the Ultra Blog Challenge is how you can do it. 

Like I said, 70% of our traffic comes from blog posts that were NOT written this month. 

Join for free at http://ultrablogchallenge.com and get started today.

Now it’s your time….to grow and share your blog with the world… 

blog-150x150Are you ready to take your blog to a bigger audience, promoting with Social Media planning, and getting more traffic? You can do just that as you get more training for blogging, Social Media, implement this blogging tip from today’s post and learn more about how to promote your blog at the Blogging Mastermind Community <== Click on the words. And, ask me how you can use Social Media better for your Blogging

What are others saying?

 “Very sound advice here! I have missed visiting your website since taking a mini break from blogging myself but am happy to have read this and bookmarked it too.” :-)  

 “All bloggers and writers should really think and work on this rather than just posting whatever – great tip – thanks!”
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6 thoughts on “Benefits of Blogging for Businesses

    • March 20, 2015 at 8:59 am
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      Thanks Jason – Kathy is truly someone who knows what she’s talking about.

  • March 20, 2015 at 9:00 am
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    Thank you so much K. Lee – that is just what we love to hear! So glad you commented! 🙂

  • March 20, 2015 at 3:25 pm
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    Fantastic post Kathy! Love your creativity and love your style! As you know 🙂 Donna was so right on when she had you guest blog post!!! Tons of value on what the benefits of blogging is! I know first hand the benefits of blogging and this post just reinforced what I already know, thank you 🙂

    Thank you for sharing your value!
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