Smart Start: The Business Benefits of Blogging

In this guide, you’ll learn how maintaining a company blog with relevant and informative content can help brands strengthen their digital footprint and improve business performance.

What’s a blog?

A blog is a section on a website that’s regularly updated with fresh content in the form of blog posts. The motivation behind the content creation can be for personal use or for business.

Why is blogging important?

First of all, blogs can have a major impact on your SEO (search engine optimization) and SERP (search engine results page) performance. According to data from DemandMetric, blogs can result in a 434% increase in indexed pages.

What does that mean?

Indexed pages are website pages a search engine has visited, analyzed and added to its database or “index.”

Page indexing is important in helping a brand achieve better rankings in the SERPs. If a page isn’t indexed, the brand won’t rank or receive visits from users.

Though that’s only one promising statistic, the business benefits of consistent blogging are undeniable and in this Smart Start, we’re sharing six of them.

6 Business Benefits of Blogging

1. Website traffic

When we’re driving in our cars, we’ll go to great lengths to avoid traffic. But, when it comes to our website, the more traffic, the better. That’s because the more people that visit your website, the better your chances are of converting them into customers.

As you might have guessed, a great way to drive traffic to your website is through a blog page.

HubSpot reports that businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don’t.

Just as the quantity of website visitors is important, so too is the quality. Creating and publishing blog posts that address a target audience’s pain points, questions, interests, and more can ultimately improve the quantity and quality of website traffic.

2. Facilitate content creation

The internet is reminiscent of an episode of Oprah’s Favorite Things...You get a new piece of content! You get a new piece of content!

There’s more content available on the internet than we can consume in a lifetime and while it can feel overwhelming, in order for businesses to stay relevant, they have to do their best to keep up.

Maintaining a company blog and using that content as a launchpad is an excellent way of doing so.

This process starts with identifying a piece of pillar content.

If you’re unfamiliar, this is a piece of content that’s transformed into additional pieces of content.

For the sake of this Smart Start, we’ll use a blog post as our piece of pillar content. From this one blog post your brand could then create:

• Social media posts - Blog posts are excellent jumping-off points for social media content development. More times than not, a blog post includes various sections that cover specific subtopics. Use each section as the foundation for a new social post.
• Video content The blog post can be repurposed and serve as the script for recording a video that’s then promoted via organic social media posts and pared down into smaller, more focused clips for advertising purposes.
• Press release Use this blog post topic as the prompt for a newsworthy press release. When drafting this press release, tweak the angle to add depth to the topic.
• Educational resource If this particular blog post flows with other topics you’ve addressed in the past, consider creating an educational resource such as a whitepaper that pulls all of the topics together in a cohesive manner. Educational resources are typically gated content which adds a lead generation layer to the mix.

3. Lead generation

According to DemandMetric, companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that don’t blog.

How can you effectively leverage your company’s blog to become a powerful lead generation tool?

Here are a few ideas:

Publish valuable content

Before you roll your eyes because you’ve seen this tip more times than you can count, really think about the power of creating helpful content.

We can almost guarantee at some point in your career you set out on a search for specific information. Every blog you clicked on promised to provide you with a solution, but you were left with nothing but fluff and frustration.

This is exactly what you don’t want to do with your blog content. When writing a blog post, swap out your brand lenses and instead see the topic through their eyes. What do they want to know? What should they know? How can you look like the hero that swoops in and saves the day by giving readers the information they need to succeed?

Useful content is shareable content and the more eyes that land on your blog, the better your brand’s chances are of attracting leads and converting them into happy customers.

Blogging doesn’t break the bank

Great results + cost-effectiveness

This is a combination that brands love and is especially true for companies that publish evergreen content (that’s content that remains relevant and timely for long periods of time).

That’s because evergreen content enables brands to recycle and repurpose their blog posts through social media posts, press releases, advertising campaigns and more. It also prevents you from having a library of content that needs regular updating to remain relevant, and you want to avoid setting yourself up for large amounts of content that can quickly become incorrect or stale.

These promotional opportunities attract users back to your website and hopefully, into your sales funnel.

It’s a long-term strategy

Blogging is a lot like an exercise routine. Though we wish results would happen after the first workout, the truth is, results take time and commitment.

The same applies to your blogging efforts. Consistent development and distribution of relevant blog posts will attract the attention of your target audience.

The more people become familiar with your brand, the better the likelihood is of them entering your sales funnel and ultimately becoming a customer.

4. SEO opportunities

The relationship your brand has with search engines is much like any relationship in life. It requires an element of reciprocity to build a strong bond.

That’s because search engine spiders are constantly crawling the internet for new information to serve to users. Brands that consistently publish fresh and relevant blog posts that are infused with viable SEO keywords, give these spiders what they’re looking for.

And, when you give the spiders what they’re looking for, they’ll in turn present your content to your target audience. Love is in the air. Can you feel it?

5. Link building bonus

Link building is an important (and difficult) part of SEO.

Though a challenge, it’s not impossible.

Here are a few link building strategies to consider:

• Give websites a reason to link back to your blog. We’ll say it for you, Thank you Captain Obvious. But, seriously, having this thought in the back of your mind while writing blog content is a great way to keep your focus on the consumer. As mentioned before, useful content is shareable content.
• If you’re in an industry that’s powered by data, lead the charge by sharing your own. Writers love to add statistics to their pieces and if you can gather and share data you’ve collected, you’ll increase the odds a website will link back to yours and give you credit.
• Aggregate information. Whether it’s a piece that pulls in quotes or data about a specific topic, roundup posts are an excellent link-building opportunity for brands.

6. Thought leadership

Your company’s website can be the sounding board for you and your fellow employees to showcase your expertise. Trending topics, industry best practices, opinion pieces and more are all viable prompts companies can use to create thought leadership content for their brand.

When executed and promoted properly, thought leadership content can strengthen a brand’s authority and credibility in the industry to peers and consumers alike.