Top 5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Blog

Are you struggling to find reasons to start a business blog?

Are you unsure whether it will be worth investing time, effort and money in your blog? Aren’t there too many blogs – literally millions of them – on the web that nobody reads? (There are 31% more bloggers today than there were 3 years ago, in case you are wondering.)

Yes there are, and nobody reads them because they are creating content to meet their own needs, not of their readers.

They make all sorts of mistakes on their blogs and in the end wonder why nobody sticks around.

Today, I am going to give you a few reasons that may help you to reconsider. So let’s take a look.

#1 Create K-L-T

If you have ever followed Copyblogger, you might have come across this concept by Sonia Simone.

Know – Like – Trust 

When you regularly publish high quality content on your blog that really helps people solve their problems, it does a few things. It helps increase awareness about your business, it creates likability. Along comes trust which is crucial if you want to sell successfully over the Internet.

By posting fresh, engaging content, all you are doing is creating brand awareness and positioning yourself as an expert. You are also differentiating your business from others at the same time.

What makes you unique? Well, write about it and let people know.

Online, people don’t buy from people they don’t know. Unless you are a house hold brand name, it is worth creating content that will help people connect with you.

You can take them up slowly on the ‘Awareness Ladder’ (A concept detailed by Ben Hunt in his book Convert, which by the way I recommend highly.)

Remember get them to know you, like you and trust you. Makes good business sense doesn’t it?

#2 Make Google Love You

I don’t want to go in the details of Search Engine Optimization – I am sure you know more than I do. All I need to know is the more pages and posts you have on your site, the more Google loves you.

Blogging gives you a reason to add fresh content to your site. While the rest of your pages might be primarily static in nature, with your blog, you continually evolve and give people new reasons to visit and link to your site.

More content and inbound links mean better search engine rankings. This is one of the main reasons who should think about having one. To constantly aim for better search engine rankings.

Think about it, what you would give if you could rank on the first page for a search query. What will it mean for you business?

#3 Drive Targeted Traffic

If your content is share-worthy, people will share it. Across many networks and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest just to name a few. This would result in more targeted traffic to your site.

Think about it, if you are a small company selling a highly specialized product , say something geared at the vegans market – maybe it is a food option or new line of delicious desserts you have developed. How would you like your posts to get shared among people and blogs who write about vegan food?

You are a local business you say? No worries, if Marcus Sheridan of The Sales Lion fame can create a huge blog for his pool company, you can make it work for your business as well.

#4 Turn into Lead Generation Machine

More targeted traffic means a significant increase in leads. Research tells us companies who maintain active blogs generate up to 88% more leads as compared to the ones who don’t. Which one would you rather be?

One way you can make sure your you blog is a acting like a perfect lead generation machine is to add a sign-up form to capture email addresses and offer a freebie to encourage people to opt-in. The ‘bribe’ doesn’t have to be over the top, you can easily create a report or a brief white paper.

#5 It Costs Less than You Think

It is not entirely free to successfully run a blog.  There are costs associated with the actual hosting, running and maintenance but those are minimal. The bigger costs are associated with developing content.

Who will be creating content? Even if you are thinking about publishing once a week for starters, that will take a minimum of hour to write the post, and additional time to share it effectively and respond to comments.

How much is two hours of time worth to you? Could you hire a freelance blogger instead? (I am currently a content creator for Open Colleges - and open to other offers! Shameless plug, I know.)

According to the Hubspot blog, blogging as inbound marketing strategy is much more cost effective than your tradition outbound marketing (Advertising, Direct response campaign etc). It costs a fraction of that to maintain that the return on investment (ROI) is impressive.

And lastly, as an additional benefit, as you slowly to begin to attract people who leave comments, contact you with questions, you begin to gain invaluable insights into the minds of your potential customers. This is first hand knowledge that is every marketer’s dream.

So, what do you say? Is it worth blogging for your business?