Five Best Reasons to Blog for Your Business

With the technology evolving faster than we can change our panties, it's becoming increasingly important for businesses to innovate their ways of communicating with customers and stakeholders. According to the 2018 Sensis Social Media Report: 68% of all internet users read online reviews or blogs — with 30-39 year olds the most likely to do so. On average, people expect to read up to 8 reviews before making a purchase decision." Pretty impressive, don't you think? Although, this sounds exciting, you are probably thinking: what in the world is ‘Blogging’ and what am I suppose to eat it with?

What is ‘blogging’ exactly?

Whilst we all know there are people out there that live off blogging, your question as a small business owner is: 'Why do I need to blog?'

Blogging is an inexpensive (but highly effective) way for a business — regardless of the size — to drive traffic to a website, accelerate marketing strategies and therefore, engage more customers. So, in plain English or in any other language, blogging is a form of content writing. More so, it's expressing your thoughts in a professional manner and connecting those ideas to the business. This, by all means, is one of the most progressive ways to build your brand without having to leave the house/office/site. You can even blog on the go with your phone if you choose.

The rule number one here: the content must be relevant to your service or a product. Now that we cleared the definition, let's have a closer look at what importance blogging provides for your business.

5 best reasons to blog for your business:

1. Boosting online visibility

I guess you are here because you want more customers? If you think of every possible way how people find your business, it becomes clear that nothing happens without a great lot of effort. If you do paid advertising, eventually the campaign runs out and Google asks you for more money: x times over. It doesn't reciprocate. What that means is that blogging will enhance the traffic flow and navigate the audience where they need to go, without massive overheads. That's a sharp strategy if you ask me. Also, search engines are smart cookies constantly hunting for fresh and creative writing across the web. When your business produces content consistently, these creepy crawlers come to check on what you have that is interesting and send your indexed pages back to their 'Queen Bee' - the mighty Google. Hence, you will notice visitors march in to read your blog, yes - your creation, and become more aware of your brand offerings.

2. Educating existing and potential customers

It makes sense for people to return to the business that openly shares their knowledge by providing informative content, therefore, engaging with readers in a personalised way. Visitors can be invited to comment, follow and share whatever information they find attractive and relevant. That, in return, breaks down the huge block of how to build and establish long-term relationships. Whether you sell rocks or roses, there are always steps to follow after the purchase. In the majority of times, buyers want to reach information instantaneously, so don't close your register straight after they have completed their online purchase, instead keep them wanting to stay by navigating to the "Home" page or other engaging reading, such as your 'Blog'.

3. Converting leads into prospects

Once traffic starts flowing to your website through the blogging, this is your chance to shine. When a new lead ends up on a relevant page, the rest is simple: make sure that blog or informative post is equipped with a CALL TO ACTON button— it's to say to the prospective customer: " Hey, I appreciate your business, let’s take our relationship to a new level" — in a subtle way. Make the button visible, don't hide it at the end on the post. People generally need a direction! Just because they found you and this awesome information and have have been browsing for a while, that doesn't automatically make them want to pay for your service then and there.

4. Establishing business leadership

Like mentioned above, buyers want instant answers, and ultimately, they want them delivered. This is a chance for you to stand out amongst the competitors, making your presence known, by creating authority on and offline. Think about this: if prospects know they can always find information on your website that is relevant to them why would they go looking elsewhere? Why would they bother, when they have exactly what they need and want at their fingertips on your website blog to create intrigue and stay informed?

Equally important, a returning customer is a referring customer. By being encouraged to come back to read quality information on your blog, they are more likely to keep you at front of mind to tell their friends about and in this way bring a friend along to your business. That tells Google that you are a leader in your niche, and what happens after is quite consequential: your website begins to climb to a prime position on a leadership board telling the new visitors there is something important about the website worth sticky-beaking into.

5. Increasing Social Media presence

You don't need a massive following on media platforms, you just need a genuine audience that loves reading about your business. Once a new post is up and running on your website, there are two ways

to share the love: either by inserting a link into Facebook , LinkedIn, Twitter or automatically sharing via Social Platform Sharing plug-ins. To gain more exposure and reap real benefits of blog writing, encourage your readers to do the same — this will help introduce your business to new people that don't know about you yet— via their friends'/family exposure. It's also a great time- saving tip for time-poor businesses: instead of spending endless hours relentlessly filling up your business page daily, why not publish one blog every week and see what happens? Quality writing is better than quantity.

To conclude, blogging or content writing gets your business discovered in search engines continuously. Of course, if it was that easy, everybody would be doing this, right? Wrong! The reality for every day business folk like you and me is the technicality behind channelling the blog in the right direction is mind-blowing. Even though the search engine knows there is something valuable on your webpage, something people might want, it sends its spider-bots to go scavenging for that content and if your page isn't optimised correctly, they come back with next to zero to report.

Google's preferred method to pull out information from web pages is to send its little crawling mates to search for specific keywords or phrases that your customers type into the search box. Regardless of how well the content is written, the chance that it might never be found is petrifying, especially after putting your heart and soul into your efforts to write. The fact is, managing business can be hard, managing the content that performs well even harder. But don't despair, help is always available. Like one of the best marketers in the world, Neil Patel says: " It’s hard for anyone to manage, and the larger your blog grows, the worse the situation becomes. That’s why it’s good to prepare in advance for blogging eventualities you might face. One of those eventualities is the question of whether you should write your blog posts, split up the work with guest posts or staff bloggers, or outsource blogging completely" (source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/outsource-blog/).

The choice is yours, but there are always lots of great options, as long as you start your blog and keep adding materials which engage your target audience, and your webpage is properly optimised then you will be surprised at the results your blog can bring. There is no better time to begin then the present. Most of all, enjoy the process. Find a quiet space where you can unwind and relax the mind to think and start jotting down your ideas. It gets easier once you start.

Written by our entrepreneurial guest: Alex Palombo, blogger and founder, travel junkie, everyday mum and content manager at https://www.laskababytravel.com