While once considered a nice add-on to include on your business website, a blog has become a necessary tool to remain competitive within the world’s digital-focused marketplace.
Companies with an active blog receive 67% more leads per month than those without. Within a marketplace where you are now competing with brands not only in your area but around the world, getting a leg up on your competition is essential for standing out amongst the crowd.
While websites have become a standard asset for most businesses, very few business owners are actually leveraging their sites to their fullest potential. This is because after initial setup, these websites are often neglected and left to decay into inactivity, which can be ruinous to your online visibility.
Meanwhile, you can actually boost the online visibility of your brand by simply maintaining the activity of your website with a consistent publication of a content calendar. In fact, research has proven that companies generate, on average, 55% more website visitors and 97% more inbound links when they maintain a blog.
And this is just the surface of the benefits blogging can provide to your service website. In this post, we are going to explore all the ways that incorporating a blog within your marketing strategy can elevate your small business into a trusted authority within your market, including ways you can connect with your audience and drive conversions.
Ready to harness the benefits of blogging for business? Contact me for a quote and consultation to discover how my blog marketing services can help you achieve your goals.
What is Blogging for Business & What Does it Entail?
Before I break into listing the benefits of blogging for business, I first want to clarify what it takes to execute an effective blog marketing strategy. After all, if you simply slap a blog page on your website and start publishing whatever you want, you aren’t going to be experiencing the full benefits anyway.
Instead, a blog marketing strategy that generates results takes a lot of planning and research. Check out this post on how to run an effective blog marketing campaign for a full breakdown of my process.
At its essence, blogging for business involves publishing content that strategically answers queries that directly address the pain points and questions that concern your ideal clients.
To do this effectively, you first need to understand who your ideal client is. Through market research, you need to create buyer profiles that detail your target audience, along with breakdowns of their behaviours and pain points.
You then need to conduct keyword research to determine exactly what your target audience is searching. Here, you determine the best way to make contact with your audience, typically by utilizing long-tail keywords with high search volume-low difficulty ratios.
From there, you can then get started on content writing, optimizing it for search engines, and promoting it within your broader digital marketing strategy.
I’m not going to get into the complete breakdown of the entire process here, but feel free to send me a message, and we can schedule a consultation.
10 Benefits of Blogging for Your Business
Now that we have a better understanding of what it takes to run an effective blog marketing campaign, let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits that make all of the work worth it.
1. Higher SEO Rankings
Perhaps the most popular reason for adding a blog to your business website is the boost it provides on search engine result pages (SERPs). Google and many other search engines tend to favour websites that are active. And there is no better way to ensure your site remains active than by maintaining a regular content calendar.
While each new post opens the potential of ranking for a wider selection of target keywords, it also benefits your site as a whole by boosting the SEO rankings for pre-existing pages. In terms of business, this means you can increase the rankings for commercial queries directed to your service pages simply by publishing blog posts related to the industry.
Google rewards fresh content, and maintaining a regularly updated business blog ensures your website remains in good standing with search engines, resulting in sustained organic traffic and SEO benefits.
2. Drives Conversions and Profits
Along with driving traffic to your website, a well-executed business blog will nurture these new leads and direct them into becoming loyal customers.
Put plainly, blogging for business can boost conversion and drive profits.
However, for this to work, there is a lot of planning and research that needs to happen. For starters, the blog posts you decide to publish should target a specific pain point that your audience has that can be solved by purchasing your product or service.
When done right, this can lead to consistent profits and new clients, with the average conversion rates for blogs across all industries being between 2 and 3%, providing a nice boost to profit margins.
3. Increases Website Traffic
Keeping in mind that the average conversion rate for a blog is between 2 and 3% – if you are only averaging about 100 monthly visitors, then you’re only going to amount to about 2 or 3 conversions.
If you are selling a product or service that earns thousands of dollars per sale, then this is amazing. However, for most e-commerce websites and small businesses that aren’t charging premium prices, just a few sales isn’t going to pay the bills.
Luckily, by consistently publishing new blog posts, you can increase your brand’s online visibility. By ranking for informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional keywords, you can drive website traffic to your service website.
Soon, those 100 monthly visitors will become 10,000, and those few conversions will be a few hundred, resulting in thousands of dollars in added revenue for your business.
4. It Nurtures Leads and Educates Consumers About Your Business
Up to this point on our list of the many benefits of blogging for business, you may be wondering “well, what about the other 98 to 97% of people that don’t convert after visiting my blog?”
Don’t worry. These aren’t lost leads.
They simply aren’t at the point in their buyer’s journey where they are ready to pull the trigger and make the purchase.
Luckily, blog marketing isn’t intended for immediate results. It is a long-term strategy that experiences its best results over time.
While immediate conversions do provide a welcome boost to profit margins, they are nothing compared to the sales that will come in the long run.
By providing valuable insight and information within your content, you leave your readers with a lasting impression and a growing familiarity with your brand that makes them more likely to choose your service or product when it comes time for them to make their purchasing decisions.
5. Promotes Affordable Long-Term Marketing
Don’t get me wrong; blog marketing can have an expensive up-front fee, especially when you are just getting started and need to take into account the creation of pillar pages, content clusters, and backlink building.
However, these start-up costs are nothing compared to the potential revenue, with both SEO and content marketing being two of the most effective marketing strategies with the highest ROI.
What’s even better is that once you have your blog marketing strategy going, you can start to roll back the amount you invest and still experience growth. This is vastly different from other forms of marketing, where you are featured for only as long as you are paying the placement or per-click fees.
If you want to hear it in numbers, businesses that focus on blogging in their marketing efforts experience 13x more return on their investment than businesses that don’t.
6. It Humanizes Your Company
Blogging is one of the best ways to set yourself apart in a marketplace dominated by large corporations. No matter what they do, large enterprises lack a sense of personal connection that many consumers value in their brand loyalty and trust.
Meanwhile, small businesses thrive on creating personal relationships with their clients. The problem is that maintaining personal relationships can become difficult and time-consuming if you hope to scale.
However, by including a blog on your business website, you are able to nurture these relationships en masse.
The trick is to focus on content topics that address the general pain points of your target audience and use a semi-casual voice that speaks directly to your reader.
When done right, the reader should feel as if your content was written with their best interest in mind, creating a sense of brand humanization and loyalty.
7. It’s a Channel for Sharing Company News
Once you have a following of loyal readers and clients, you can begin leveraging your blog to share company news and updates. Keeping your audience informed about your latest updates and achievements encourages engagement and reinforces a consumer’s personal investment in your brand.
Additionally, your business blog can be the perfect platform for announcing business updates such as product or service launch, which may be of particular interest to long-time fans and has the potential to drive well-nurtured conversion for your new launch.
8. Enhances Link Building Efforts
Beyond lead nurturing and generation, blogging for business also offers extensive SEO benefits in the fact that it produces more link building opportunities. By providing valuable content, business websites with a blog tend to attract 97% more backlinks than websites without.
Since backlinks are the only method search engines have to evaluate the authority of a website, these websites generated through your blog are the key to establishing your brand as the leading authority in your market in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
In short, by maintaining a frequent blog post publication schedule, you make your website more available for linking opportunities, which in turn increases your web authority and garners your website better rankings overall.
9. Enhances Social Media Marketing Efforts
A business blog provides a treasure trove of material for your other content marketing efforts, particularly for promoting your brand on social media.
Each blog post you publish should provide extensive insights and information that can be easily repurposed for other social channels. In fact, as many as 70% of marketers repurpose their blog content for other channels.
Not only is this an easy method for reaching a newer and wider audience, but it also can become a method for driving traffic to the blog itself, which in turn further nurtures the leads and procures a loyal audience.
10. Built-in Email Newsletter Content
Similar to how it can support social media marketing efforts, a business blog also enhances the performance of your marketing emails.
How many times have you struggled to come up with content to include in your business newsletters?
Well, when you have a business blog, this becomes less of a problem. Instead, each of your blog posts can become a resource that you can include in your emails, be it a newly published guide, service announcement, or communication.
Potential Drawbacks and What to Expect
While the benefits far outway the drawbacks, I do want to touch on some of the negatives of blog marketing so that you are fully aware of what you will be getting into.
It Requires a Time Investment
While blog marketing is one of the most rewarding marketing strategies, it is also one that requires the most time investment.
This is because regularly publishing blog posts involves extensive topic and SEO research, writing, editing, and promotion. When all is added up, even producing one blog post can consume a whole day or more.
The problem arises in the fact that a single blog post likely isn’t going to make a significant impact. Instead, I always suggest aiming for at least two blog posts per month. But even this isn’t leveraging your platform to its fullest potential.
According to research, businesses that blog 16 times a month often experience 4.5x the amount of generated leads compared to businesses that blog less frequently. I personally have found the publication schedule that yields the best results is one that has 12 new blog posts and four updates per month.
There is the Potential for a Slow ROI
As I’ve already mentioned, blog marketing can be more affordable than other forms of marketing and has longer-lasting rewards. However, it also takes longer to start seeing results.
On average, you shouldn’t expect to see significant results from your business blog for at least three months, with other significant milestones coming at the sixth and ninth-month intervals. However, a marketing blog can take up to a year to fully start producing reliable results, but once it does, things begin to start growing exponentially.
Competition Can Be High
As the international economy continues to shift to a digital marketplace, more and more companies are looking to harness the potential of a marketing blog. This has resulted in higher competition and a growing difficulty in standing out.
However, the key to elevating your brand over the competition is in providing resources that go above and beyond that of your competitors.
Doing this is an art.
And while I am not going to break down the steps quite yet, I will be sure to publish a guide sometime soon. In the meantime, feel free to reach out and schedule a consultation.
Kurt Norris is the founder of Kurt’sCopy, where he helps B2B, e-commerce, SaaS, and local businesses craft compelling content and SEO strategies that deliver measurable results. With over six years of experience, Kurt specializes in creating data-driven campaigns that drive traffic, increase conversions, and establish brand authority.
