Blogging for business is not just about you writing whatever you feel like writing about. And people would think that blogging is almost dead in an age where Tumblr, Pinterest and Facebook are being eyed by businesses for their marketing.
If done right, blogging can really help you run your business and market your products.
However, the key words here are “if done right.” You can certainly do a lot of wrong when blogging. Yet the benefits of blogging to your business should make it worth your while to learn how to do it. Why?
1. Blogging establishes you as an expert in what you do and not just as an ordinary business owner.
Blogging about something like your business and any other thing you love should be easy. You get to share knowledge and insight about your products, services and industry. This establishes you as an expert in the subject matter.
Using your blogs to establish you as an expert is particularly useful for service businesses such as those of plumbers, electricians, repair technicians and the likes. Your customers might be looking for information on how to fix a leaking pipe and stumble upon your blog. Your posts will tell them that you know your stuff and they would trust you more than another business without a blog.
2. Blogging should be the cornerstone of your social media activities.
Granted that social media is the best way to engage your customers, you probably would not get far in it without blogging. When you write a blog post, it goes on your business’ blog site. And that should not end there.
You could share your blog posts with your fans on Facebook or your followers on Twitter. You could participate in Q&A sites like Quora and instead of explaining in detail how things are done, you could just insert a link to a relevant blog post you have written.
So you see, blogging can certainly help you engage your customers better. Furthermore, it would give you a chance to connect with them more often: instead of just updating your Facebook profile and announcing a new product, promotion or discounts, you could tell people that you have a blog post from which they could learn a thing or two.
It would also help you get people to your door. For example, answering a question on Quora with a link to your blog post would drive people with the same problems to your site.
3. Blogging helps your search engine rankings immensely.
A vital part of any campaign is your Web site. Your Web site would be the first point of contact for people who are looking for information about your products and services. It is also where they could buy your products even without going to your physical store. The importance of your Web site and its contribution to your business merits yet another article entirely.
The sad truth, however, is that you would need to be visible on search engines for your Web site to succeed in getting new customers. If you do not appear on the first page of search results, you really do not stand a chance against your competitors.
This is where blogging comes in. Blogging helps your Web site and search engine optimization in three main ways.
- It gives you the chance to get more keyword-targeted pages up on your site. You can use your blog posts to target certain keywords that you have to help potential new customers find your site. So on top of the pages you already have on your Web site, you add more pages that search engines could serve up to customers. The rule is: the more content you have, the better your chances to hit a keyword and show up on searches.
- It gives you the chance to get more quality content on your site. Content has always been king, and with Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, content has solidified that position. Blogging gives you the chance to put up more quality content on your site. By quality, we mean relevant, informative, or entertaining content that people would like to read and search engines would love.
- It gives you more links from other sites. We may have seen a lot of changes pertaining to how Google and other search engines work, but some things stay the same. One of these things is how Google decides if your site is authoritative or not. The more incoming links you have, the better. In the past, this was easily manipulated by buying links from other sites. Now, however, those links should come from other quality sites with content that is relevant to yours. If it is not, that link would actually cost you some brownie points and drag your site down.
This is where blogging comes in. By establishing yourself as an expert in your subject matter, or by developing relationships with other similar businesses and customers, or by simply coming up with an informative, entertaining and educational blog post, you could get links from other sites talking about the same thing that you are talking about. The best part? You could get it naturally without having to pay for anything.
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