The value of blogging
Blogging has multiple benefits for your website
Blogging can be a key part of your web strategy. If you’re looking for reasons to blog, here are four to consider.
Blogging drives traffic to your site.
As a basic strategy component, blogging’s primary purpose is to drive traffic to your website. Your blog is a low-cost tool that provides interesting content to visitors. This content works its way into search engine results, and can bring visitors to your blog. The more pages your site has, the more opportunities you have to draw visitors in.
Blog visitors may also spend some time looking at the rest of your website – which is the reason you published the blog text in the first place! To get search engines to notice your blog text, your blog content should be optimized for search engines. That means it should have a clear, focused subject and compelling, solid content that search engines will notice.
Blogs also tie in nicely to social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and others. If you’re blogging, you can easily send out links to your latest blog posts via social media, and create more paths to drive visitors to your website.
Blogging has a role in sales conversion.
Getting visitors to your website is step one in the sales process. When you make it easy for people to take action immediately upon reading your blog post, you can draw them farther into the sales process. What does “taking action” involve? Clicking a link to send an inquiry email, filling out a form to download a white paper or brochure, registering for a webinar or signing up for a free trial are all examples of taking action. Basically a call-to-action is a way to generate leads. Not all leads will pan out, but a call to action helps you create a way to contact a potentially interested buyer.
Blogging helps build your client base.
Some businesses don’t use their blogs for direct lead generation. Instead, they use their blogs – quite effectively – for education and outreach. Consumers appreciate high quality content. You can use your blog to answer questions, introduce new products, promote your services and provide useful industry information. You may not get a customer to fill out a form with this kind of blog, but they’ll think of you first when they need help or good advice.
Blogging creates the “long tail.”
With blogging, your content is available to a reader when the reader is ready to see it. You may publish something in January, but a reader might not look for your blog content until June. No worries. Your content is still there, indexed by the search engine, and ready for the reader when they’re ready to visit. Most blog content isn’t read immediately when it’s published. Instead, they create a “trail of breadcrumbs” for readers to follow. This strategy delivers readers who are genuinely interested in your content and motivated to act.
In my next post, I’ll discuss blogging frequency and the effectiveness of blogging compared to other web traffic strategies. In the meantime, if you would like more information about blogging, or you’re interested in working with a freelance writer to create content for your blog, please contact me at eileen@juliesocean.com or call me at (734) 961-0408.
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