It’s 2018! You are still not sure why you should blog? First of all, business blogs are a great marketing channel that skyrocket online visibility – as such – it supports your business growth and revenue.

You will become more relevant in your industry, you will connect with your customers on a more personal level, and create long-lasting relationship with then.

Content creation is now a 300 billion dollar industry and advertising has changed.

Believe it or not, customers want to be advertised to. WHAT? Yeah, your customers want to read what you are talking about! This goes beyond just selling to them. The art of blogging and content creation is about creating huge value upfront  to your customers.

Regardless if you have a porta potty company or a high end fashion line. Your customers have problems, concerns, and questions. Now is the time to be there for them – they will pay you back!

Below we are going to outline why you should blog and then give you the tools necessary to start creating and distributing value content to your audience.

WHY SHOULD YOU BLOG?

1. Generate Traffic

Do you want more website visitors, but you don’t want to spend tons of money on paid ads? We thought so. The solution is blogging, social media, and search engines.

If you Google something about your business, you will get millions of results related to the subject. We googled “Digital Marketing Agency”, and we got 3,720,000 results. How do you compete for top positions?

Blogging might not seem an obvious solution, but it is a great start! Every time you post a blog on your website, you add one more opportunity to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in organic reach.

These frequent updates of your website indicate that your website is active, and search engines check your website often to see what new content to surface. Those activities, therefore, help you improve your SEO strategy greatly!

Blogging can also help you with your social media accounts. Every time you blog you are creating content that people can share on their social media profiles.

Here is a great example by The Blonde Salad on how to turn your blog posts into high-quality social media content:

We hope that you are already convinced to start blogging. If not, we assure you that, by the end of this article, you’d be more than willing to do that!

2. Generate Inbound Links

Having high-quality inbound links to your site is one of the three pillars of SEO (another two are content strategy and established social media channels).

Without a blog, you will not have many authoritative links to your business website. Adding new content serves as a resource for other bloggers and media, they will refer you, and you will start getting even more inbound links.

Buzzfeed is a great example – they have a huge base of articles they publish daily, and they use inbound links for each one of them:

3. Convert Leads

This is new traffic is a huge opportunity for your business to convert that traffic into high-quality leads. One way to convert this traffic is adding a lead-generating call-to-action.

When a visitor comes to your website to read a blog, make sure that you include a call-to-action for a free offer somewhere visible.

When a visitor clicks on the call-to-action, it should take them to a landing page where they can enter their email to receive a free offer.

Those free offers can be free ebooks, free cheat sheets, free webinars, free guides, free trials – anything that has a value for your visitors.

This is one good example of call-to-action by Estee Lauder:

4. Establish Authority

Let’s say that you are a fitness company. Your customer are full of questions!

How can my arms look good in a dress?

I want to eat healthy, but I don’t have much time to prepare my meals, what should I do?

I’m on a diet and I want to eat something sweet, what is allowed?

The list of questions is endless.

Do a search, establish what questions are popular (and more importantly, popular but not answered properly or you could add too), and create a blog posts answering them!

By creating content that is helpful for your target audience, you will establish your business as an authority in their eyes.

Tone It Up girls knows what their audience wants – great abs and arms from the convenience of their home.

Their blog posts are exactly that:

5. Drive Long Term Results

Let’s say again that you are a fitness company and we persuaded you to write and publish a blog. You did your research and realised that 5 Ways To Pump Your Arms Before Going Out is a popular topic, and you know a lot about it.

Then, you share your blog post on your social media channels. In the first day, you might get 200 views and 15 leads. By tomorrow, you can have another 90 views and 9 leads. In a few days, you will have thousands of new views coming from the social media channels. But it’s still not over.

Your blog post is now ranking in search engines. Every time someone searches for pumping arms, you will get traffic and leads from that blog post. While you might not see immediate results, over time, you will be able to count on additional traffic and leads from that exact blog post.

Blogging is the easiest and cheapest way to make the internet work for you!

6. Humanize Your Brand

You can craft a website carefully and make sure that it’s engaging, but it can never be compared to a blog posts.

When it comes to showing the personal side of your business, bogging can solve your visitor’s issues and give them immediate answers, but you can also show them your voice, your passions, and what drives you and your company.

Let’s get back to your fitness company. On the homepage of your website you will present information about yourself, your training methods, special offers, etc. Most people utilize the informal tone of voice. We as consumers are trained to read pages like this.

However on your blog you can tell them more about the why. The why you work or started your company is incredibly important. If you have not seen Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk we highly recommend it.

Your blog gives you the freedom to express your values. You can have your trainers tell more about themselves. You can give them advice about nutrition. You can help them choose the best training equipment.

Now they realize that you are a  real people, not just someone hiding behind a corporate veil.

Tone It Up is, once more, has a great example. They have great content and workouts but also create relatable and engaging content:

That is it for step one! You are now one step closer to being a content master. In step 2, you will learn how to gain readers, optimize your content, and more.