You don’t have to be in the creative industry in order to make blogging work for you. In fact, any type of business could benefit from using a blog. Apart from the obvious – driving regular traffic to your website – blogging can be beneficial in a number of ways.
Here are some of my favourite reasons why you should be writing a blog to support and expand your business.
1. Drives Organic Traffic
Writing a blog gives you the perfect opportunity to continuously create new content for your website. Each new post you publish is another page for search engines to index. Search engine crawlers look favourably upon active sites meaning that, as you are adding new content, you are increasing your chances of being ranked highly in search engine results.
2. Helps to Establish You as an Expert
Your blog is an extension of your brand. You should aim to consistently provide valuable content. How can you help people through your writing? If you share your knowledge, showing that you really know what you’re talking about, you will be able to establish yourself as an expert in your field, gaining trust and respect for both yourself and your business.
3. Helps to Generate New Leads
Each post you publish is an opportunity to collect new leads. Have you ever read an article online that ends with an additional offer? For example, ‘if you enjoyed this, you’ll love …’ This is usually followed by a call to action, encouraging you to download something, or subscribe to a newsletter.
You can do the same. Your offer should be an extension of the published article, providing additional knowledge and information. You could use an eBook, an infographic, a worksheet or something else entirely. Anyone who opts in will provide their email address to you, giving you an additional lead.
4. Provides Content to Share on Social Media
Do you ever have trouble coming up with ideas for what to post on social media? I know I do. But a great advantage of blogging is that you will regularly have new content to share with your connections. You can also revisit your older content and re-share in order to reach a new audience.
By sharing your content on social media, you will also have the opportunity to get your content noticed by new people who may not have seen your blog before.
5. Provides Shareable Content for Others
Make it easy for people to share your content on social media, by adding share buttons to each post. (If you’re a WordPress user, there are a number of great plugins you can use that will automatically add the buttons for you.)
When someone comes across a post that they enjoy, or that was valuable to them, they will likely share it on social media. This will put your content in front of an entirely new audience and create new inbound links to your website. (These are great for your SEO.)
6. Helps you to Keep Your Own Knowledge Fresh
If you’re focusing on providing valuable content, you will need to ensure that your own knowledge is up to date. When writing new articles, I will often research the topic beforehand, allowing me to be sure I am providing the best possible information. You’ll probably find that you’ll pick up a few pointers along the way.
