4 Simple Reasons a Blog is Good for Business

Although blogging has been around for a while now, it’s still sometimes viewed more as an online diary than a tool for serious businesses. This couldn’t be further from the truth. When managed with sufficient care, attention and creativity, they are remarkably powerful in generating consumer trust and sales. If you run your own business and have yet to be converted to blogging, here are four reasons you should strongly consider it.

Strengthens brand identity and trust. Blogs offer businesses a unique combination of opportunities. On the one hand, it’s a great way to develop the personality of your company in the eyes of your target market in a way that’s difficult to achieve on your ‘about’ page. On the other, informative blog posts about pertinent topics in your field are extremely useful tools to demonstrate your authority and expertise. In both these senses, blogging allows you to build trust with your target market and even has the potential for you to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. This hinges on the quality of your blog, however, and you’ll reap the rewards if you put sufficient effort into writing informative and engaging content, as well as presenting it professionally. The former is down to you, but the latter can be made much easier and less time consuming by using a managed WordPress blog package like this one.

Trust in brands is extremely important to consumers; you should not only be displaying the value of your product, but also your value as a knowledgeable and reliable brand.

Drives conversions. A potential knock-on effect of this enhanced level of authority in your business’ niche is, simply put, more custom. In today’s climate, where consumers are increasingly skeptical about traditional advertising, driving conversions is more about presenting your business with a trustworthy image. Of course, this image should match reality! One way to do this is including a strong, clear call-to-action on your blog posts to turn your readers’ interest into results. For instance, you could write about a topic relating to your goods or services and direct readers to a relevant product of yours. This is an effective way of showing consumers that you’re offering them more value than merely harassing them with a sales pitch. Similarly, offering free offers or incentives in exchange for their email address encourages people to engage with your brand, while bolstering your mailing list. Another benefit is that this applies to both online and offline business.

SEO and Web Traffic. Simply put, blogging increases the visibility of your website and business in general, both from a search engine and human perspective. Ordinarily, the content of a business’ website offers details about the firm, their products or services, perhaps customer testimonials, and things of that nature. The problem is, this content is largely static because it isn’t supposed to be updated constantly. Blogs, on the other hand, ought to be updated regularly. Each time you publish a unique, high-quality blog post it gives search engines an opportunity to index your website and rank on its results pages. What’s more, because each post will be on a slightly different topic it’s the perfect opportunity to target a variety of keywords.

As long as you pay attention to good blogging practices, your organic visibility should increase and, by extension, web traffic to your site.

Enhances your social media presence. Blogging, when done well, greatly supports and enhances the social media efforts of your business. Blog content gives you more material to share with your followers, but not merely in a superfluous way – it offers you greater scope to diversify your social media activity and maintain an active feed. Furthermore, blog posts can be a great form of sharable content on social media. With a well-targeted topic, a snappy headline, and of course a well-written piece, your audience will be more inclined to like and share. This not only pleases the algorithm on Facebook, for example, but also boosts traffic to your site. Infographics do particularly well on Twitter and Facebook, so integrating one into some of your posts and using it as the thumbnail when you share is a good tactic.