How does blogging benefit your business?
Blogging is not new but can still offer great benefits to your business and your website. Even as more and more social media tools emerge, blogging is still holding its own as a very worthwhile addition to your marketing efforts, and the benefits can be huge.
Here are the greatest benefits (in my opinion) of blogging for your business:
- Adding fresh content – if your website stays exactly the same for months or even years on end, nobody will bother coming back after a while. Blogging is a great opportunity to add new, relevant topical content. New content will encourage people to keep coming back and will also help boost your search engine rankings, which in the long term will help bring new people in too.
- Becoming an authority – if you want to stand out from your competition it’s great to try and position yourself as an authority on your chosen topic or area of expertise. Whilst your main website will explain to people what you do, a blog can add a bit of personality and really give potential clients a flavour of how you think and work and what your opinions are. It can even help your reputation spread further by encouraging word of mouth. In most professions, you’ll probably find that there are topical trends and issues that you can find to blog about and explain to potential customers what the implications are for them. For example, if you’re an accountant it’s great to explain what the latest budget announcement, or a new piece of legislation will mean to your target market, or even remind them of a looming tax deadline. Adding personality to your site can make your business less price sensitive. If you help people understand things that are important to them, they will come to you first, rather than shopping around for a cheaper supplier.
- Building a dialogue - marketing is all about giving customers what they want. And you’ll never truly know what they want without paying a lot of attention to them and ideally asking them what they want. Writing a blog can be a great way to build dialogue with actual and potential customers. By allowing them to post comments on your blog you can find out what they think and maybe even why they don’t buy from you currently. Some might challenge your views, but at least you will get a chance to give your side of the argument back in response, or in some cases they could make a valid comment that you can use to improve your business. Either way, comments are something to be encouraged, and not something to be afraid of. Potential customers might even be impressed with the way you respond off the cuff to a comment from another reader. If however you’re really worried about negative comments you can easily set your blog so that you get to see all comments and approve them before they appear on your site.
These are just some of the business benefits of blogging, and there are many more, so please post a comment if there are any others you want to share. I hope you’ll agree the above benefits are ones that would be good for pretty well any business.
If you want a blog setting up, contact me and I’ll be happy to talk you through your options. It’s really quick, easy and affordable to do.