Blogging for Your Business? Yes You Should

Did you know a lot of people still see ‘blogging’ as new web 2.0 fad, although it all started back in 1994 (20 years ago!) and web 2.0 itself has been around since 1999 (15 years old!) and that most companies still leave it by the wayside?

If you’re a business owner or someone responsible for a companies marketing and not sure if and why you should be blogging, read on.

What your business blog can do

The first reason why you should have an active blog with regular updates is that it helps you to increase the content footprint of your website, which means there’s more to crawl and index for Google. Over time this will results in getting high quality, long-tail traffic from Google.

The second reason is that it gives you an outlet where you can present your company in whatever way you see fit. The blog is on your site and that means you have full control over what gets published. A lot of companies focus most of their time on Facebook and LinkedIn company pages but neglect their own online place of business.

Reason number three is all about branding and giving yourself a voice. Once people visit your site and read through some of your blog posts, you have the opportunity to show them how much you care about your product or service, what level of authority you have on the subject, and how you deal with your clients for example.

The fourth reason is the fact that your blog post might make or break a sale. Let’s say a visitor landed on your blog post after doing some product research on Google. If they like what they read and feel that they can trust you, that blog post could help them make up their mind on the spot.

Reason five piggybacks off reason one, traffic. Every single blog post you create has more value than just content to get indexed by Google; it is also content that can easily get shared by people. If your post becomes popular on social networks, you’ll likely attract links from other people’s blogs that mention your post. In turn, those links will help your SEO.

 Blogging Stats, Facts & Figures

• 77% of all Internet users read blogs.
• Businesses with a blog generate 126% more leads
• 60% of readers feel a companies positivity after reading their site
• Interesting content is in the top three reasons why people follow brands on social media
• 61% of online consumers have bought a product based on reading a blog review
• Having ~50 blog posts will drive 30% of a site’s traffic.

Beat your competitors

Somewhere along the way you have probably considered starting a blog and never ended up going through with it. The main reason likely to be either the amount of time you need to put aside for blogging, or the fact that you feel that there are already so many other blogs out there and that you might not get noticed.

What if I told you that only 13% of Australian companies have an active blog? Or that 43% of businesses in Australia don’t even try to maintain an online presence? (PDF)

I don’t know what you’re seeing, but to me it sounds a lot like this.

op·por·tu·ni·ty

n.pl.op·por·tu·ni·ties

1.

a. A favorable or advantageous circumstance or combination of circumstances.

b. A favorable or suitable occasion or time.

2. A chance for progress or advancement.

Want to get started with a blog?

Here’s a few tips to help you get started. The world’s most popular content management system (CMS) for blogs is WordPress and it comes with loads of added functionality in the form of WordPress plugins.

The advantages of WordPress are the constant improvements made by the hands of thousands of developers who work on the CMS. It is an easy-to-move-elsewhere solution, which means you won’t get stuck with a web design and development company that you don’t get along with.

We made the choice to focus our core web design service and web development on the WordPress platform because those reasons. It helps us to provide a better service to our clients. Oh, and of course our own site is completely built on WordPress too!