Blogs are so ubiquitous in the online world that it may seem like it’s not worth the effort to maintain your own. After all, blogs can take a lot of effort to maintain. You need to be current, consistent and relevant. Is it worth all that time and energy with so many blogs out there?
We certainly think so. It may seem abstract to tie the efforts you put into your blog to the success of your business, but there are a number of benefits of maintaining a quality blog.
Thought Leadership
A quality blog helps to establish you, or your organization, as being expert and informative in your industry. If you’re a business attorney, you can draw visitors to your site by posting knowledgeable blogs about business formation or common contract issues. If you’re a plumber, you can do the same by posting about common maintenance and repair issues facing potential customers. If you’re a content marketer, you can write about blogging!
Ear to the Ground
Unlike a newsletter or a TV commercial, blogs are interactive by design. They encourage discussion and active feedback. If you can generate some participation by your market, your blog can be a great way to do some market research to get a feel for what your potential customers are thinking, saying and doing. And, even if visitors aren’t actively posting to your blog (they often don’t), you can still gain marketing insights from your analytics which will tell you which posts get the most traffic, create the most engagement and lead to additional online actions.
Site Traffic
As noted by Social Media Delivered, one of the primary reasons to use a blog for your business is to drive your SEO numbers. And, as noted above, even if you don’t see a lot of chatter on your blog, you can use tools like Google Analytics to see how highly trafficked your site is. You may be surprised. As long as your content is genuinely relevant and useful to your target audience — not simply a naked plug for your product or service — you stand to generate a lot of visitors.
Repurposing Your Content
One important best practice for those thinking about creating a blog is that you can repurpose those blog posts in a variety of ways to help augment your content marketing activities. This can save time and extend the reach of your information. For instance, blog content could be used in bite-sized chunks as social media posts. Larger excerpts could be pulled together to create an e-letter that you distribute on a regular basis. That’s exactly what we do with our monthly e-letter.
Maintaining a blog might seem like just another activity, and it can seem hard to stand out among the crowd, but there are some very real benefits to having a dynamic online presence tied to your business.
Don’t have time to do it yourself? Get in touch. We work with a variety of clients to help curate and create content for their websites, blog posts, white papers, e-books, and more.
Recommended Reading:
The Everything Guide to Customer Engagement
