Why Blogging for Your Business Can Make a Huge Difference
This post was last updated on September 16, 2022.
If you’ve recently created a website for your business, you’ve likely only seen a trickle of visitors. Don’t be discouraged—you’re not going to see explosive traffic numbers right away. You need to lure people in, and creating a blog is a great way to do that.
Blogging for business is a content marketing tactic in which a company creates content related to its product or service to improve its online visibility. But visibility isn’t the only thing you stand to gain; in fact, business blogging is so valuable that it is a top priority for 53% of marketers. This post will discuss the many benefits blogging can bring to a business and give you some tips for how to start a blog.
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The benefits of blogging for business
Blogging for business can strengthen your company in these ways:
01. Increase website traffic
Business blogging increases the number of pages on your company website, thereby expanding its online presence and providing more avenues for potential customers to find you. One study found that businesses that blog have 55% more website visitors than those that don’t. The more website traffic you get, the more you’ll reach potential customers who will likely book, purchase or fill out a contact form to stay in touch.
Consider Make Pop Music—a Wix website that sells production presents—as an example. When looking through the business’s Wix Analytics, we noticed that this blog article had the second highest traffic volume after the homepage. After popping the link into the Ahrefs site explorer, we understood why—it had the top spot on the search engine results page (SERP) for “studio desk setup,” a keyword that averages 150 searches per month. The site explorer also revealed that the post’s high search traffic made it the second most valuable page on the site after the homepage.
02. Drive conversions
Blogging doesn’t immediately pay off for businesses in the way that advertising does; most corporate blogs don’t see a positive ROI until they’ve been blogging consistently for 6 to 12 months. That said, blogs gain potency as they grow which means that they have a longer lifespan than ads. In fact, 56% of marketers say that blogging is effective and 10% say that a blog has the biggest return on investment of all marketing strategies.
To take full advantage of that potential, Ivory Paper Co. shares one of its blog posts at the top of the homepage. The article links to nine of the company’s planners and—as we can see in the “top navigation flows” report below—successfully leads site visitors to product pages.
03. Contribute to social media efforts
If you only use your social media accounts as free ad space, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Social media marketing can improve customer retention, as it keep businesses top-of-mind for interested consumers. To reap those benefits, you need to share valuable content that makes consumers want to follow you. Your blog posts will (ideally) contain information that will interest your target audience, so just reshape your content to fit the feed. For example, you could turn the most valuable morsels in your blog posts into social media graphics. On average, small businesses that blog have 79% more Twitter followers than those that don’t.
04. Builds trust in client relationships
People trust what is familiar. Blogging gives customers the opportunity to learn more about your company than they could from an ad or a landing page. A blog gives you a platform to answer frequently asked questions and share company news. Plus, sharing high-quality content shows your target market what you know about your industry, so they can trust you to provide a quality product or service.
Quixotic Design Co. uses its blog to demonstrate that it knows how to scale businesses with strategic design. For example, Why your website isn't making you money explains how companies can use visual hierarchies and cues to drive conversions. By sharing such an article, the agency simultaneously offers a free resource and demonstrates its value to potential customers.
05. Reinforces your brand
A blog gives you almost unlimited space to deepen your brand identity. Take Bonny for example—this creative agency uses its blog to emphasize its niche as content creators for lifestyle brands. With catchy titles like #StayHomeStayInspired and Boost Your Superpowers – 3 Best Healing Stones for Busy People, the agency shows that it can create content that appeals to a lifestyle brand’s audience.
06. Differentiates a business from its competition
It can be difficult to show customers how your business offers more than your competitors—especially when your product or service isn’t flashy or easily accessible. For instance, a customer needs to actively research which SEO tool is actually the most effective for them. To deal with that challenge, Ahrefs built a comprehensive blog that shares valuable tips for analyzing data. When relevant, the blog posts feature step-by-step Ahrefs tutorials, a clever way of marketing the product in a way that is beneficial to the reader.
07. Encourages engagement
Customer engagement reinforces the connections between a brand and its fans, thereby encouraging repeat business and expanding a company’s reach. Whenever a company writes a blog post, they create something that loyal customers can share with people who might have never heard of the company.
The Home Depot has shown how potent such a strategy can be. The company blog created a Patio Style Challenge series that encouraged hundreds of influencers to promote The Home Depot on their own channels. The Home Depot took full advantage of all that free content by sharing it on a Pinterest board that has almost 3 million followers.
How to start blogging for business
Now that we’ve established how valuable blogging for business can be, it’s time to create a plan for your business blogging that will make good on that value:
01. Determine the focus of your blog
People are most excited to read, share and link to blog posts which cover relevant and specific topics to them. If your target market is people interested in being more eco-friendly, you’d likely benefit from writing a blog post about reusable plastic.
02. Set metrics
Content marketers predominantly use traffic metrics to assess the effectiveness of business blogging, but they also look at sales lead quality, sales and conversion rates.
03. Refresh existing content
Although there will be plenty of posts that never even rank, those that do can bring in steady traffic for years after publication. Plus, a low-performing SEO post doesn’t have to stay low performing. Giving articles an occasional refresh can improve their SERP rankings. In fact, content marketing agency Animalz found that refreshing a post improved its performance by 55%.
04. Invest in high-quality blogging tools
As we’ve established, you’ll need to do more than scribbling a few thoughts and hitting publish to make a blog successful. To effectively curate, promote and track the performance of your blog, you’ll need to invest in blogging tools that will best support those efforts.
Tip: Wix not only has blog templates that make designing posts easy, but it also has multiple web analytics tools that’ll help you understand how your blog supports your marketing efforts.
05. Promote your blog
Keeping your readers engaged is just as vital as attracting them. Social media and email marketing are great for promoting your blog and networking with active customers.
06. Establish goals for content creation
The more you publish, the better your blog will likely perform. That said, you must be realistic when deciding how much time and money to spend on your blog. Publishing quality content on a consistent basis will be much easier than trying to pump out as much content as you can as fast as possible. Create an editorial calendar with the articles you want to write and the schedule you intend to stick to. Doing so will not only help you publish consistently, but it’ll also help you track your progress along the way.
By Emily Shwake
Wix Blog Writer
