A lot of businesses create their websites with the necessities: they have their products, pricing, and contact information. They likely have great “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages, too. But you know what so many business websites are missing? A blog. I get it. Blogs don’t really seem that important in the scheme of things. You might have the idea that a blog won’t make much difference, or that people simply won’t read it. I’m here to explain why a blog is so important, and why you should start one today. If you do have one that you’re not updating, get to updating it because you’re missing out on tremendous opportunities for growth in your company!
So what can a blog do for you?
1. It attracts new visitors. With every post you create, you’re offering exciting content for others to share on social media and via email. With each share, your name and website are circulating more and more. If you don’t have a blog right now, the only way people can find you is by looking for you directly. Basically, you’ve got word of mouth. Yes, there are ways to pay for traffic like purchasing email lists for blasts and paid ads. But think about it for a second, these avenues can be expensive, shady (if not illegal), and a lot of times as soon as you stop paying for them, you stop seeing results.
With a blog, though? You’re generating new content to your website with every post, which allows this content to organically pop up in search engines more often. The more blog posts you have, the more often you pop up. The more you pop up, the more new people find you.
2. It gives you more of a social media presence. Social media is a massive help to businesses these days. If you don’t have your own social media accounts yet, I highly urge you to do so. That’s another post, though! While you should certainly be maintaining your own presence, the great thing about social media and blogs is that others can help you maintain a presence as well. With steady blog posts, people can discover and share your posts via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and more. Once your posts are shared there, they are spread amongst the poster’s followers and so forth. You can see how this could mean generating quite a bit of new traffic to your website if you are creating new and interesting content that people would find truly worth reading.
3. You get free calls to action. Each blog post usually gets its own page, so if you place an individual call to action on each page, you could generate a new lead with every blog post. Think about it. Right now, you likely already have a call to action on every page of your website, but you have a minimal number of pages, right? Imagine if you had a blog added in, and your blog had dozens, if not hundreds of pages, all leading back to a money-making opportunity for you and a benefit for them? We all know how great calls to action are, but they can be overwhelming with too many on a website. A blog allows numerous calls to action without having them come off as being heavy-handed or forceful.
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4. It trickles in results. You know how there are companies who tout sales positions with “long-term” results? You know, they sell something once, but in that one sale, there’s an ongoing commission? A blog is a lot like that. Once you sit down and write a blog post, it’s finished. It’s published and on your website. After that, you will always get views, and you will always get leads. Sure, you might have a slow month where you will only get one view, or maybe even no views, but that blog post will always be there. It will be available in search engines for anyone to find and click on, leading back to you. That means that while you’ve moved onto other ways of making money, this blog post is still working for you. Every blog post you write after that is doing the same thing. The more you write, the more results you’ll see. No, it may not be a waterfall’s worth of results, but even a trickle is worth it, don’t you think?
Hopefully, this article gave you a few good reasons to start a blog, or at least made you think about why it’s a good idea. You may not know what to write about just yet, and that’s okay! For now, just let the idea roll around and sink in. I’ll be writing soon with some tips on how to start to help you from here!