7 Massive Benefits of Blogging for Business
Even though blogs often appear insignificant on your homepage, they have the power to drive new organic traffic from search engines over a long period of time. It’s true, they are less often visible and engaging than social media, but blog content also delivers in-depth insights that can persuade decision makers. Social media posts just don’t have the same kind of girth.
These are just some of the reasons why business blogging is highly underrated, in my opinion. In this article, I hope to underline the diverse benefits of blogging.
What makes blogging Different from other media?
Originally, the word “blog” referred to an internet diary. Soon, it became clear that blogs could serve a more strategic purpose for businesses. After all, people can get your business updates from the news, social media, and your press releases.
A key difference between a blog and social media is the fact that your blog exists on your website, and the content belongs to no other platform. It’s a critical part of your owned media. With owned media, you have the undivided attention of any visitor you receive.
A business blog is one of the most effective ways to attract organic traffic to your website from search engines. Thanks to the curiosity of internet searchers, your blog can attract new traffic on diverse topics with each post you publish. Even though your blog is usually tucked away in a link in the menus of your homepage, each published post offers a different entry point to your website, thanks to its unique target keyword.
Since people view your site’s pages in an asynchronous fashion, it helps to publish “evergreen” resources on your blog that provide long-term value. It’s this key distinction that makes blogging different from social media and breaking news, which usually aims to provide the most up-to-date information. Your blog is more like a strategically curated encyclopedia than a diary.
Growing your web traffic with business blogging not only brings more leads, it signals business prowess. It’s also easier to measure how leads interact with your website than with social media or ad platforms. This enables you to test out different inbound strategies based on audience behavior.
Here’s a quick summary of how a well planned blog can benefit your business.
7 Benefits of business blogging
Blogs give your business credibility. A content-rich website is a trust signal that indicates staying power.
Blogs give helpful insights to their audiences. This way, blogs help build brand awareness.
Blog posts can be repurposed in email marketing campaigns, social media, and video content. You can even repurpose them into social media posts multiple times with different key takeaways.
Conversely, blogs can also help disseminate the key takeaways of your longer pieces of content: podcasts, reports, and white papers.
Blog posts can showcase your expertise with internal SME interviews.
Blog posts can respond to FAQs your customers raise and you can share them whenever needed as a form of customer support.
Blog posts bring organic traffic to your site from search engines. This particular benefit requires a thorough SEO strategy to be effective, which is why I provide SEO strategy services alongside my writing.
All of these benefits combine to provide excellent ROI, and long-term value to your brand.
How might a business use a blog?
Getting the most out of a business blog starts at the planning stage. When I work with clients on SEO strategy, I combine my insights about their core business model to ensure their content will provide them value long term. Without the appropriate strategy and planning steps, I’ve seen many business blogs fail.
Consider planning your blog to provide value to your audiences in the following ways:
Organic traffic generation (see tips below)
Thought leadership and conversation starters
Personalized topics for your segmented audiences
Brand and mission storytelling
Product and service education
Social media engagement through repurposing (scroll down for strategies)
Cross-promotion with key partners and collaborators in your business
Customer service support and responses to FAQs
Blog strategy: Why It’s important to Plan for SEO and Inbound marketing
To target key goals within your blog content plan, you’ll need to start with a clear blogging strategy. I suggest using inbound marketing strategies and SEO research as you develop a content plan.
For inbound marketing, I suggest aligning content topics to your marketing funnel to reassure leads about your brand’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT) at every buyer stage.
For SEO research, I suggest defining keyword-based content gaps that relate to your products, services and mission and then creating blog post pillar pages and sub-topic pages on every nuanced detail.
Some people will not have the budget for building out a fully detailed content library. However, a long-term consistent strategy can be immensely helpful for long-term growth. To start, you can definitely spare enough money to create at least one pillar centered on your core business aims.
Then, as you produce the content, you can structure the sub-topics to internally link to category pages. This sends signals to search engines, so they can identify certain keyword themes as your core area of expertise.
To level up even further, you can use a competitor analysis to understand how to make your particular brand and blog unique. By assessing how your competitors have built out their own content libraries, you can identify crucial gaps or weaknesses in their approach to strategically position yourself as a valuable alternative.
The following steps provide strategic research and insights into their brand from both an inbound marketing and SEO perspective. This is the full range of services I provide:
Discovery call
Brand-centered client questionnaire
SEO Audit
Brand-centered keyword research and strategy
Competitive analysis and strategy
Editorial calendar and content gap strategy
Tracking and monitoring and historical optimization
Promote your blog posts across your marketing channels
Once you publish your blog posts, there are still lots of ways to continue to reap benefits from them. While this is not a service I provide, it is crucial for clients to get value out of their content marketing efforts.
With some clients I’ve worked with, I’ve noticed a tendency for them to publish posts and let them sit. I would argue this is not the best use of a blog.
Other clients I’ve written for are more proactive. They’ll blast their blog posts to their mailing lists and get great feedback. They’ll recycle the ideas within the blog into clever social media posts that improve engagement. They’ll link to the blog post as the key resource in emails and other conversations.
Here are some ideas for repurposing your blog posts in social media to improve engagement:
Take a central claim from the blog and turn it into a LinkedIn poll to gauge opinions on this issue.
Summarize your blog post in a visually appealing IG carousel post.
Round up the sources you’ve linked in your blog into a series of links on a topic in LinkedIn.
Visualize the data from your blog post into a helpful infographic to share.
Make an announcement linked to the theme of the blog and then link to the blog to provide context.
Ask a provocative question linked to the central theme of the blog post.
Share a shocking statistic or fact from the blog post with an emotional reaction (or emoji reaction if it’s part of your brand voice).
Celebrate wins linked to your blog post theme, and then link to the blog post for additional information.
Repurpose your blog post into a video animation.
Create a Q&A video discussion that references facts from the blog post. Link to the blog post in the description.
Build your content library with blogging
Keep in mind that to be effective, blogs don’t have to follow a news cycle or seasonal trends. In fact, they work better when they provide a web of linked information that serves as an evergreen content library.
They should provide value related to your core business operations and mission. This way:
Website visitors can browse them any year and they’ll still be relevant.
You can share them with leads for years to come.
You can repurpose them across different channels indefinitely.
You can continue to update them with new information and research. Historic optimization (updating based on search behavior) helps keep your blog posts fresh, which is an important SEO ranking factor.
This overarching strategy ensures that your marketing budget doesn’t become a sunken cost.
Learn more about how I work with companies to develop content libraries that provides core business value. Schedule a discovery call today.