Why Blogging is Important for your Online Business.
In the fiercely competitive global space of online business, getting the attention of potential customers is probably the number 1 challenge that everybody struggles with. This is especially true for newer businesses who are battling to establish a strong online presence.
Good business viability depends on good marketing; good marketing is about relationships, attracting them, building them, and keeping them. What better way to do this than with a regular output of well-written, content-rich, genuinely informative blog posts that keep both customers and search engines interested and happy?
Here are just a few good reasons why blogging needs to be a key component of your online business strategy and why marketing experts Act-On are urging online business owners to #MarketYourBlog effectively.
1. Attracting the traffic.
It’s no good having a stunning website if nobody lands there. Trying to divert web traffic your way without a strategy, hoping your target market will somehow stumble on you by typing in the right keywords, is unlikely to get you the results you want. A good blog is a way of attracting the right kind of attention by increasing your online presence.
2. Building your loyal customer base.
Everyone’s looking for that magic key that will guarantee them a constant supply of ‘right’ visitors that they can effortless turn into customers. Your blog, if it hits the right spot, can give you a kind of win-win visibility that more structured marketing strategies can’t match. There are all sorts of advantages to tailoring your blog posts to delivering content that is helpful, informative, as well as encouraging your visitors to act-on the content of your blog.
3. Maintaining good relations with your visitors.
There are numerous tricks and strategies for bombarding uninterested strangers with your unwanted sales pitches. All of them come with their down side. Paid ads are expensive {and who reads them?}. Illegally ‘bought’ email lists are unethical. Sticky ads that latch annoyingly onto every browsing session can have the opposite effect to the one you want. Hostile leads are very unlikely to translate into willing customers. You want them queueing up voluntarily at your blog door, not tricked, drugged and carried off to your site under protest.
Blogs are an easy way to keep your website active and the search engines interested and attentive. They give multiple chances to embed keywords appropriately into content and increase the chances of your business name coming up in random searches. The more traffic they get the higher they advance you on the google lists.
5. The benefits of shareable content
Good posts make for shareable content that people will be keen to repost on social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest. This helps to broaden the scope of your business blog far beyond your own website and gain you new readership streams who may not have heard of you before. They get to see your best side – which makes them much more likely to want to what you’re offering.
6. The sleeper effect
Blog posts have a useful durability that continues to work for you even when the content has had its post-by-date. Good content retains its relevance and older posts that continue to be visited remain active in search engine rankings. If people like what you write they are likely to click back on earlier posts too. That means you still continue to get traffic and leads from those blog posts as well as the newer ones.
7. Establishing a trustworthy image.
There is nothing like an informative, well-written blog help to establish you as a trustworthy authority on your sales area and give you the edge on competitors. The best way to do this is to consistently create helpful, interesting, trustworthy content related to your business themes that people actually want to read.
If you enjoyed this article, keep a look out for the new ebook that that Act-On www.act-on.com are publishing in July, all about “Branding and Marketing your Blog for Business” which includes contributors from the Content Marketing Institute, other expert bloggers and online marketing experts.