Business blogging is a highly effective, but often underutilized tool in the world of marketing. Due to the heavy focus on social media in today’s marketing environment, blogging often doesn’t receive much attention. However, it can be a brilliant marketing tool when used right!
Let’s say that your business is a coffee shop, and you have written an excellent article about different coffee blends. Someone searching for this very information stumbles across your post on Google and comes away satisfied. But here’s the thing: they also discovered your brand, even though they weren’t looking for it. That’s the kind of organic reach that business blogging can give your company.
Blogging falls under the broader umbrella of ‘content marketing’. The focus of content marketing is creating content that your potential customers will be interested in. By providing a resource that they find valuable, you are one step closer to winning them over.
There is an urban myth that nobody actually ‘reads’ anything anymore, they just skim for info. In truth, that couldn’t be more wrong. With such a super-abundance of information on the web, we have become a lot more discerning when we look for information. So, if you focus on creating high-quality content that solves your customers’ problems, you identify your business as one worth paying attention to.
However, it’s important that you don’t treat your blog as something to cross off the list when it’s ‘done’. Building a successful blog with strong traffic takes continuous time and effort, but it’s well worth it. Here’s why:
Boost Your SEO
As we mentioned in the coffee shop example, your blog provides another way for your audience to find you. Put simply, the more posts you produce, the more pages that will get indexed, and the larger the profile you can have. Also, algorithms favor sites that frequently post new content over those that don’t. (If your last post was in 2015, your blog isn’t helping your SEO a great deal!) However, this definitely isn’t a quantity over quality scenario. So-called ‘thin’ pages without quality content can actually be penalized by Google. The same goes for ‘overstuffing’ your blogs with keywords to try and rank your site higher. Instead, focus on tailoring meaningful content that addresses the interests of your audience.
Share Your Expertise
Blogging provides your company with the opportunity to show that you know your stuff. By curating relevant content, you can shape yourself into THE authority on matters of interest to your audience. As well as our own content, look to ‘guest post’ on industry blogs and do ‘blog swaps’ with companies that you partner with. This way, you become more than just a company that sells X and Y; you also offer intrinsic value to your customer and industry base into the long-term. Plus, adding links on other sites will improve your domain authority, which helps your SEO!
Interact With Your Audience
The last thing you want is to be seen as a faceless company. Blogging is a great way to build a rapport with your customers, and to develop a community around the core values of your business. No matter what industry you are in, the most important part of your business is the people behind it. In e-commerce especially, it can be tricky to communicate the essence of who you are as a company. Your blog is a space where you can show off your personality and humor (or in our case, our terrible puns!) and show people how you like to do business.
To sum up, getting a company blog up and running is a serious time investment, but well worth the effort. We recommend that you get typing!