Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
If your business is not blogging, you might want to consider it.
Blogging has become commonplace in just a few short years.
What started as a forum to share thoughts, ideas, and opinions has quickly become a business marketing tool.
Many businesses are jumping on the bandwagon and getting into blogging because of the potential to market new products, services, or business ideas.
As an organization develops a blog following, it can keep its customers informed by sharing helpful content.
The goal would be for customers to then share the content with others in the hopes of gaining new customers.
6 Reasons a Business Should Blog
1. Communication Tool
A blog is a useful tool that can help your business keep in touch with customers.
The more a customer sees your content, the more likely they will be to think about you when they have a need for one of your products or services.
Use a blog to share information about new products, services, or even a change in hours amid the pandemic.
Write blog posts that help readers get to know you and your personality. The idea is to personalize the content, so readers feel like they know you.
After all, if a customer feels like they know you, they will be more likely to trust you and the products or services you sell!
2. Website Traffic
Businesses know more now than ever, the importance of being found online. Gone are the days when customers looked for a business in the neighborhood phone book.
People search the internet for information and for the products and services they use.
Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites because they have content that search engines find – and other people share that content.
For instance, if you own a kitchen store and write a blog post about the latest canning techniques, Google may send you traffic from search results with those keywords.
3. Expand Customer Base
Anything your business can do to expand its customer base is important.
Blogging helpful articles allows readers to forward blog posts to others and expand your audience.
4. Marketing Tool
Blogging can be used to market new products and services.
Blogs provide an opportunity to capture search engine traffic.
For instance, if you write a blog post about canning techniques and a potential customer finds that article, they will land on your website.
After they get to your site, there are many ways you can convert them into a paying customer.
5. Source Of Revenue
You can increase revenue and make money blogging with advertising and affiliate relationships.
Partner with other businesses and share products and services that complement what you sell.
For instance, if you own a Kitchen store, partner with a local market, and promote specialized ingredients for customers.
6. Educational
The most successful blogs are educational. These blogs provide helpful, educational content that readers love.
Use your blog to educate customers about your products and services.
For instance, if you own a kitchen store, you can create a video blog post demonstrating safe knife-handling techniques.
Write articles that promote your services, special events, or your perspective on changing market conditions.
How To Create A Business Blog
Develop A Strategy And Plan
Before you start a blog, stop to think about why your business needs one.
A well thought out strategy and plan will help to ensure your blogging efforts will pay off.
For instance, if your strategy is to expand into the online market, create a plan that will help you achieve that objective.
Write Blog Goals
After you have developed your strategy, develop a plan to implement the strategy.
Take the time to write SMART goals that will help you achieve your plan.
For instance, if you have a plan to expand your market outside of your local area, you may have a goal to increase organic search traffic to your website.
Know Your Niche
Identify your business niche and target it. The more narrow the niche, the tighter the plan.
For instance, if you own a cooking store, but specialize in hard-to-find baking equipment, that is a very specific niche that you can capitalize on.
Do Keyword Research
One of the most difficult things about writing blog posts is having a list of blog topics.
We all know that answering questions is what internet search is about.
Spend some time researching what your customers are searching for.
Identify a research tool to help you and start gathering keywords and keyword phrases to write about.
For instance, if you own a cooking store, you might find search results for things like: cooking techniques, cooking utensils for, how to create, etc.
Put together that list of keywords and use it as a guide for blog topics.
Collect Email List
Businesses that blog experience twice as much email traffic as businesses who don’t, so you want to take advantage of this tactic.
Whether or not your business blogs, a customer email list is the new currency.
Find a creative way to collect customer emails and use an email service like MailChimp to distribute your blog newsletters.
Make sure you understand the CanSpam Act, so you don’t accidentally get into trouble for violating the public trust.
When you write great content, blog readers have a reason to return to your website – which gives you another opportunity to make a sale.
Study Analytics
Google has many free tools that can help you learn about your traffic.
Google Analytics can tell you how readers found you, how long they stayed on your site, referral traffic, and even where visitors were from (geographically).
Use and study this data to improve your strategy for bringing more traffic to your website.
Assign Responsibility
For a business blog to be successful, someone needs to be responsible.
Identify an “owner” for the blog. Someone should be responsible for, and held accountable for writing, posting, and reporting outcomes of the blog.
Create a job description and identify goals for the responsible employee to ensure the job gets done.
Adjust and Improve
We know that successful businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve their products and services.
Study the data and adjust your strategy and plan based on what the data suggests.
For instance, if you learn from analytics that many of your readers live in a different state, you may adjust your strategy to include online sales and video training.
Things change so quickly, it seems as soon as the ink dries on a plan, the rules change, so be ready to be flexible and adaptable to change.
Go For It!
If you feel like you need to learn more about blogging, there are lots of different blogging training tools that make it easy to understand. Join the club; it is quite fun!
If you are even considering blogging for your business, don’t be intimidated.
Sit down with your team, strategize, make a plan, assign responsibility, and just start. With time, your business blog will be sending you customers that you may have otherwise not been able to reach.
Does your business have a blog?