Why is a blog so important?
Maybe you have a website that you love—it’s beautiful, has well-written copy, and says what you want. But you don’t want to deal with a blog, even though you hear that you should.
I like to look at it this way:
Say you’re shopping different providers (day care, pool service, dog trainer, etc) and find two great companies. One has a nice website, the other has a great blog with lots of information and you leave feeling more informed than you arrived — which one are you more likely to contact?
If you’re like most of your potential customers, you’ll at least lean heavily toward the company with a blog.
They’re powerful bits of marketing wrapped up in helpful information that don't even make an effort to sell you on stuff. Here are a few tangible benefits of having a business blog.
Blog Content Can Be Used for Social Media Posts
You know social media is important, but what should you post? When you’re stuck wondering what you should post, your blog can (and should) be part of the plan. Evergreen content, the type that has an unlimited useful life, has endless uses.
Even if you published it a year or two ago, that post about why your dog shouldn’t be free-fed is just as valuable. New followers may not have seen it yet and it gets them on your website, digging through content. All the while, they’re coming closer and closer to choosing you because they're getting to know you, starting to like you, and learning to trust you. Even with the advent of AI searches, blogs are still important because they give the answer engines AND search engines content to use for contextual searches.
Increases Authority & Builds Trust
Existing and potential customers like reading about you and why you do what you do. They want to know why you opted for one approach over another, why this bit of tech works better than that one, and how you can help solve their problem.
Blogs that fulfill customer’s educational/informational needs make you into the go-to in your industry. But there’s more!
- When people read your blog for the latest on the industry, they’re more likely to become a customer. Plus, they’ll enter your sales funnel more informed and ready to commit to your product or service.
- Phone calls and emails between you and new customers can leave a lot unsaid or unasked. But a well-written blog that goes into detail about your products and services elevates your customer’s knowledge while making you the obvious choice.
- Well-written blogs that show how your services and products solve their problems forge a connection that can’t be achieved by slapping a post up on Facebook.
Increases Website Traffic
According to Hubspot, regular blogging can increase your website traffic by 55%. That’s a huge number, and is partly because of the priority that Google places on websites with active blogs.
So, if your website gets 1,000 visitors per day as-is, adding a blog can increase that to 1,550 over time – giving you 550 more chances to sign a new client. Multiply that over several blog posts and months, and you’ll see even more results.
Blogs Improve SEO
An established blog with a regular schedule improves SEO over the long-term. Given that SEO is a long-term game, a blog is perfect part of the equation. Many companies discover their older evergreen blogs continue to bring in traffic, and some can become compounding blog posts that steadily grow in traffic over time.
Sites without blogs are stuck working for attention for the same few keywords and phrases. Blogs allow you to rank for more than the basic “pool service in Fort Worth” set. Plus, sites with blogs are indexed roughly 434% more often by search engines. You could rank higher than an older, more established site just because of a blog.
Unlike those fly-by-night, “we’ll get on page one of Google” companies, SEO done properly takes time. It’s not a quick fix, and yes, sometimes it costs money. You can experiment and learn on the fly, that’s fine.
Just be sure to craft a content strategy first.
Additional Revenue Streams
Depending on your business model, you may decide that your website and blog can bring in even more revenue. Adding affiliate ads or even company merch not only increases revenue, but as your merch makes its way around town, your brand recognition grows.
Content Is King, But it Better Be Good
Late last year and into this year, some companies laid off their writers, hoping to go with cheaper-better-faster AI-generated content.
It was a flop.
They all had to fix it, and some needed to swallow their pride and go back to the very copywriters they’d fired.
What they (not being writing specialists) didn’t realize was that AI doesn’t do anything all that accurately. It hallucinates facts and repeats the same idea over…and over again. It’s mediocre at best.
AI can be a terrific tool to speed up your creative process and help brainstorm ideas, but it’s not a substitute for a human, skilled in writing quality content.
Adding insult to injury, Google did a massive update, effectively reducing some websites’ traffic to almost nothing and completely de-listing others. Even some of the biggest names were affected, like Forbes.
Some sites had done nothing wrong and were back on Google soon after. However, the vast majority had low-quality content and AI-generated content.
The moral of the story? Don’t get caught up in fads, create a strategy for your content, then stick to it. If something isn’t working, then by all means, adjust it! However, by creating a content plan, you’ll have a better idea of what to adjust.
In the end, make sure all of your content makes you proud to say it’s yours—whether you created it or a freelancer. Don’t settle for less.
Not Sure What to Write?
I can help. We’ll sit down and discuss your business, website, and what you need. I’ll help you create a content strategy (if you haven’t already), advise on frequency and give you a quote with a few different options tailored specifically to your business.
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