When Was Your Last Blog Post? Here's Why You Should Get Back to It:
A blog on your website is a powerful tool, and yet many businesses don’t have one or don’t update it, missing out on these valuable marketing opportunities:
Broadcast News
This is the most obvious use of your blog. When you’re running an event, when an employee celebrates a birthday, when you pass a business milestone – every bit of news you want to share with your colleagues and clients can be posted to the blog on your website.
Once you have established this as the official news source, you can share it through the company newsletter, your social media platforms, press releases, and so on, with everything linking back to your website where you control the information.
Establish Authority
Writing intelligently about your industry and the products or services your company provides shows readers that you are an expert in your field. People need to know, like, and trust you before they buy. Regular posts that explain your process and answer their questions builds their confidence in your capabilities, making it easier to reach that “buy” decision.
Collect Leads
Every article on your blog should include a Call To Action. If someone was interested enough in your content to read it, don’t neglect this chance to help them take the next step. Plan to write some “evergreen” posts in addition to those that are more transient. “Evergreen” articles provide good information to your prospective customers long after they are written, giving you many more opportunities to reach people over months or even years.
Sow Search Terms
This is probably the most valuable aspect of business blogging. By now, we all know the importance of using keywords in your web content so that search engines will serve up your business’s website when a prospective customer is looking for someone like you.
Robots look for these keywords when they’re deciding if you’re the right answer to a search, but the algorithms are smart enough not to fall for keyword-stuffing tricks. They expect content to be written in a way that real humans want to read. Blog posts fulfill the needs of both robots and humans. Quality articles that incorporate well-chosen search terms make terrific landing pages when prospective customers are looking online.
Because the marketing support blogs provide is so solid, we are always surprised to see business websites without blogs. Or even worse, with only one “Hello, World!” post from 2009. Blogging is not as impossible as people fear. Every article doesn’t have to be a novel or written by the same person. Mix up the types and length of your posts and invite colleagues to contribute. Or you can hand the whole task off to the Sprocket Websites team. Give us a call so we can talk it over!
Photo by cottonbro studio
This article is an update to “5 Better Uses for Your Business Blog” dated 2/16/2015.
Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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