Clients often wonder why they should start a business blog. Their biggest question is “how does a blog lead to more sales?” Well, as all good PR people know, it’s about building relationships with your customers and prospects. Provide interesting content and the leads and sales will come after that.
1) You are the expert. You have a business because you are an expert in something, whether it be a product or a service. Use your expertise to have a conversation with your prospective customers and current clients. The blog is an ideal platform for you to educate and inform on your area of expertise.
2) Generate more traffic. Companies want to generate more traffic to their website and, in turn generate more leads. Writing a weekly blog can help drive more traffic to their website. HubSpot research indicates companies that blog generate 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, 434% more indexed pages than companies that don’t blog.
3) Improve SEO. Businesses want to improve their search engine rankings with a blog. Providing inbound and outbound links will improve a company’s search engine rankings over time. Any SEO juice you generate from your blog will automatically benefit your corporate website as well.
4) Use social media. Blog posts lead to content marketing programs that companies can promote on LinkedIn (and other social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Pinterest) as part of a thought leadership campaign. By using the “one-two” punch of a blog and the social media site LinkedIn, companies are really taking advantage of today’s PR toolkit. In fact, Hubspot reported that social media and blogs are the most rapidly expanding marketing channels today.
What is stopping you from starting a business blog today?