What Is The Value of Business Blogs
With more and more people thinking about adding blogs to their existing websites, or blogging regularly and wondering if it’s working, I thought we’d address the topic of “Does blogging add any value”? If it does, why does it work and how is it best to go about doing that?
How Business Blogs Add Value
More articles generate SEO benefit primarily from the internal linking; there are more pages and more content gives you more links to other parts of your website and more internal links, which are beneficial for your SEO. New content is part of Google’s algorithm so Google tends to favour new and unique content so more recent content helps your search engine optimisation as well.
There are two primary outcomes of blogging, the first of these is direct traffic so if you target a keyword that relates to things your target market is looking for, then you will get found for those, if they are optimised properly, then you will get traffic – people coming in order to look at that post because they are looking for an answer to a problem that you are helping them solve.
Furthermore, all the posts and the interlinking and the recency of the content will improve your overall search engine ranking and therefore will drive more indirect traffic to other pages and posts on your site, and you will overall get more business leads from that activity. Let’s have a look at some of the evidence, companies that have more than 51 blog articles on their blogs experience a 77% lift in monthly leads.
Business to consumer companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month than those who do not. 88% of corporate bloggers saw a boost to their search engine rankings within three months of their starting the blog and 62% saw an increase in sales within three months of launch of their blog, which is probably why over one-third of companies are using blogs for marketing purposes, and the trend and expectation is that this will continue to increase.
That is because blog readership is growing among all demographics as internet usage is increasing and there are currently as expected 122 odd million readers of blogs, people who look at a blog at least monthly with a straight-line expectation that will increase to 150 million in 2014.
What Type Of Business Blogs Are There?
So, what type of blogs are there? Well, you can create:
- FAQ-type blog posts ? can answer questions, “How to do X,” “How to do Y.”
- You can talk about what?s new in your market, what?s new in your company?What’ss new amongst your staff?
- Provide news about the market in general, news about your product categories.
- You can also pull together curated content from three or four different sources and make a post out of it and pull it all together into something useful about a particular topic.
- You could create Photo Blogs especially if you are a photographer or some who are interested in taking photographs. You can use photographs of social events, of work functions, etc. to enhance the value of the blog.
- You can publish information about changes in products, changes to market conditions, etc., and you can also talk about the successes of your company, your staff and particularly your customers as your blog posts.
Business Blogging: How Often Do You Need To Post
So how often would you need to post? Blogging frequency has an impact on lead generation so people who post frequently report that they generate more leads than people that post less than monthly, for instance, but in my view, there is not a lot of difference between weekly, daily and multiple times a day. There certainly is a big difference in weekly and monthly so you might want to aim for weekly to start with.
The issue is that if there are no updates, then there is nothing to see for your blog readers so you have to trade that off with how much time you have to produce the posts, and also you need to consider the issue that content is king so how useful is the information? There?s no point in producing six pieces of garbage every day just for the sake of it so your ability to find useful information and to write quality posts is a part of that trade off.
So I would recommend that you look at weekly, and you focus on delivering quality content with really good value, something that people will come out at the end of the reading of the blog and go, ?Wow that was interesting, that was good, and that was worth reading.? and feel positive about returning later.
Business Blogs And Content
Don?t hold back in your blog posts, don?t leave out information, and don?t miss out on important stuff for the sake of getting somebody to do something. Get into it with emotion. If you want to have a rant about something, or you’re upset about something, then say so or if you’re really happy about something, then say so.
Be consistent, if you decide to post once a week, do that every day of the week at the same time. So if you’re going to post every Friday, make sure you do it every Friday and try and make sure that you do it at the same time every time. That way, your blog readers get used to the fact that the post and content are going to be there, and you can use the functionality that exists within CMS websites like WordPress to schedule your posts so that you can write them a few days before and post them at a particular time.
Business Blog Content Leverage
The last thing that I’d recommend at this stage is that you leverage your content so that once you’ve posted it on your website, make sure that you post it on an article directory or two. Make sure that it goes on your Facebook business page. Make sure that you make a link to it on your twitter account even make a video as I am with this one so that you are leveraging content and not making new content all the time and not getting full value out if it.
How We Can Help You With Business Blogging
So now that you know that blog posting works, you can get started yourself, or you can talk to us about getting it done for you.
We can:
1) Hire and manage writers.
2) We can get them to write on the correct topics for your blog because it?s often difficult to decide what topic to write about.
3) We can ensure that once you’ve written your posts that they are correctly optimised so that the search engines are more likely to find it and understand what it?s about, and we can promote your posts on other blogs and article networks and even in video form deliveries to leverage that content so that you get good value for it.