Can a Blog Help Grow my Business?

As a digital marketing agency, we often recommend our clients include a blog on their website. Unfortunately, many business owners immediately reject the idea, believing that blogs are too much work. We ask that you learn more about business blogs before instantly dismissing them.

What is Business Blog?

For many, the concept of a blog conjures up images of someone writing about travel, gardening, or their collection of widgets. That is a personal blog, not a business blog.
HubSpot defines a business blog as “a marketing channel (just like social media, direct mail, email marketing, etc.) that helps support business growth.”
A business blog is part of your website that provides regular posts with information about your product or service. For instance, PMI’s blog focuses on online marketing. A garden center blog will most likely concentrate on plants and gardening, and an insurance company blog on insurance topics. 

What are the Benefits of Blogging?

The primary benefits of a business blog are…

1. driving traffic to your website
2. converting website traffic into leads

These two benefits alone should be incentive enough to have a blog but consider SCORE’s “reasons to keep an active business blog”:

• Inform customers about the good work you do – People like doing business with companies they know give back to the community.
• Share testimonials to earn the trust of new customers
• Find out what your customers want
• Promote a positive employer brand, so employees want to work for you
• Analyze your marketing demographics so that you can target your advertising dollars effectively
• Help business partners grow
• Earn extra cash
• Get employees involved in sharing their expertise

Tips to Create a Successful Business Blog

If you’re going to invest your time and/or money in creating a blog and regularly adding posts, you’ll want to get the biggest bang for your buck. Here are seven tips to creating a business blog that drives traffic to your website, converts traffic to leads, and provides the benefits SCORE listed.

1. Post Consistently – Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. Whether you’re posting once a month or once a week, consistently posting is the key to building a following. Generally, the more frequently you blog, the more traffic you’ll see. However, we often see businesses jump into blogging with weekly blog posts, then quickly fizzle out and completely stop blogging. Consider what resources you have to determine how frequently you can post in the long term.
2. Provide Valuable Content – Whatever you post, make sure that your customers and prospects find the information valuable. Think about their pain points, understand their resistance to purchasing your product or service, and listen to their questions to determine blog topics that will attract the readers you want.
3. Share Your Blog Posts – If you incorporate SEO tactics (see below), you will receive organic traffic to your blog, but you need to share them if you want to get the most out of your blog posts. Post links to your blogs on social media, newsletters, email marketing, etc.
4. Mix it Up – Not every post needs to be strictly text. Try mixing it up with infographics, videos, images, etc. Watch what type of posts receive the most readers, comments, shares, etc.
5. Make it Easy to Read – Readers will stop reading your posts if you don’t make them easy to read. Your posts should be well-written and proofread. We recommend using Grammarly – software that detects spelling, punctuation, and other common errors (free or paid versions). Plus, most people scan things online, so make it easy to scan your posts using subheadings, bullets, shorter paragraphs, etc. 
6. Make it Easy to Subscribe – People are busy. They may not remember to check your blog each week or month for a new post. If you make it easy for them to subscribe – through an RSS feed or a post-by-email option – you’ll have more consistent readers.
7. Write for SEO – Don’t miss out on one of the most significant blogging benefits – driving traffic to your website – by not incorporating SEO tactics. We aren’t talking about cramming your post with keywords. Search engines have become smart enough to recognize that tactic. Instead, follow these tips:

• Do some keyword research to know what words your readers are using in their searches. This can also help you determine relevant topics.
• Include those keywords WHERE APPROPRIATE
• Include Meta Descriptions that are about 155 characters
• Use internal links
• Use categories and tags to organize your content
• Create compelling titles with about 70 characters
• Add Alt Text to your images
• Make your blog mobile responsive
• Make your URLs short and descriptive
• Have a link building strategy

What if You Don't Have the Time to Write Blogs?

One of PMI’s internet marketing services is blog writing and posting. We hire professional writers who create original, well-written content, and we optimize and share those blogs for you. If you want the benefits of a blog without the hassle, give us a call at 484-297-6395 or  contact us online .