Marketing
A No-Nonsense Approach to Growing Your Business with Blogging
By Ryan Parlee
Ready for the most obvious statement of the day? OK, here it is:
Unless you run a factory where you make nothing but hugs and sunshine, you’re in business to make money. Everything else you do is a matter of maximizing your cash intake. Plain and simple.
From the pencils you purchase to the health care you provide to your employees, every decision a company makes should have an influence on its bottom line. By providing nice pencils, you ensure legible writing, speeding up production. By providing health care, you ensure your employees won’t get sick and stay productive.
So what the heck is the purpose of blogging? Does writing all of this content really impact your company’s bottom line?
Your Blog’s Goal
The second most obvious statement of the day: Everything you do for your business should have a goal behind it. And your company’s blog is no different.
If you’re just writing content for the sake of writing content, quit blogging or change gears today. There’s no sense in cluttering the Internet with more so-so content about whatever it is your company does. It’s uninspiring, uninformative, and doesn’t help your potential customers.
If you’re going to blog, blog with three goals in mind: grow your business, become more visible, and answer your customers’ questions.
Become More Visible
One huge benefit of blogging that many companies don’t think about is its role in search ranking. The more content your site has available, the more likely you’ll be regarded positively in the all-important eyes of Google, and your company’s site will float to the top.
And you really don’t even have to do anything out of the ordinary to do so. According to Kapost.com, blogs give websites 434 percent more indexed pages (that is, pages that search engines track) and 97 percent more indexed links.
The more content you create, the more likely you’ll show up in someone’s search results somewhere along the line.
Answer Questions
“OK,” you say. “Why don’t I just write a bunch of garbage content and stick it out on the Internet? Won’t more content make me more visible?” That’s true, but not the whole truth.
While it’s true that the more content you make, the more likely it is you’ll show up in search results, there’s an important caveat: the content has to be top-quality. Brands that blog for the sake of blogging don’t just sell themselves short – they can hurt their search ranking.
Make blog posts with the sole intent of answering the most-asked questions you and your company receive. These evergreen blog posts be enormously popular and, better yet, the leads that will come to you from these pages will be better vetted for business.
Grow Business
If you blog, your business will grow. It’s not rocket surgery.
According to Kapost.com, 82 percent of marketers who blog see positive ROI for their inbound marketing. Better yet, B2B companies that blog generate 67 percent more leads per month compared to those that don’t blog.
And maintaining a blog doesn’t have to be a burden. Spread out the work between members of your team, and have them answer questions that they’re the best at answering. More blog posts that answer more questions equal better leads, which equals more sales. Serious professionals and brands need to invest time in building their online reputation through blogs, or they’ll get left behind as their competition takes the lead.
In short, blogging can boost your revenue and revenue by making you more visible online and building your reputation as trustworthy thought leadership.
Get out there and try it. Your customers will thank you.
Photo courtesy sophiadphotography
How do you grow your business with blogging? Let us know in the comments!
