It has been decades since the start of blogging as a marketing strategy. It drives website traffic and promotes products and services as well. It also helps build trust with potential customers. It is no secret that blogging has a lot of benefits for businesses, but the key idea here is to know how to effectively use it as a marketing tool.
Here are some of the many benefits of blogging for business and how you can get started with creating relevant content that drives inbound links and traffic to your site.
There are a lot of ways in which you can get website visitors. One, they could type your name right into their browser, which means they are the audience you already have and it will not help you that much in getting new traffic to your website. Two, you can buy an email list and blast them, hoping some people will open and click through on the emails. However, this is kind of expensive and illegal. Lastly, you can also pay for traffic by placing tons of paid ads, but this is quite expensive. The second you run out of money, your traffic stops coming too.
The right strategy is through blogging and optimizing your site for search engines. Every time you create and publish a blog post, it is one more indexed page on your website, giving you the opportunity to show up on the search engine results and drive traffic to your website in organic search.
Blogging for your business also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you create a new article, you can also share them on your social networks to help expose your business to a new audience that may not know you yet. You can also use your blog as a repository of content instead of creating new content for your social media.
After getting some traffic coming to your website through your blog, this is the perfect opportunity to convert that website traffic into leads. The key action here is adding a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post. These calls-to-action can be free ebooks, whitepapers, fact sheets, webinars, trials, or any asset with which someone would be willing to exchange their information.
Blogs that help with common questions for their readers are the best. If you consistently create valuable content or articles for your target audience, it will establish you as an industry leader in their eyes. Prospects who find answers to their everyday questions via blog posts written by you will most likely come into the sales funnel trusting what you have to say because you have helped them in the past, even before they were interested in purchasing anything from you. They will know about your products and services, your place in the market, and your industry. Pretty soon they will cave in.