Now more than ever, small to medium-sized businesses (SME’s) need to differentiate themselves from the avalanche of information that surrounds potential customers online.
The very nature of the internet and being connected 24/7, also means that your business’s message could become drowned out. This is a potential death knell as it takes time to restore trust and present a clear message of what your company stands for. However, there is a silver lining to all of this, namely in the form of blogging.
I am sure that most of you have already heard about blogging and perhaps assume that it is only related to small bloggers and their personal websites. This is not the case. Blogging has numerous benefits for improving your online business’s visibility and boosting trust and making you an expert in your field of business.
If you can be the go-to resource for your audience, you will find potential customers or clients turning into very real ones. By creating a blogging calendar and creating fantastic content, you will see minimal investment pay dividends.
5 Ways blogging can boost your business
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you are unaware of SEO, it is essentially the act of getting your website to the top of whichever is the dominant search engine in your business area. As Google dominates the worldwide share of search traffic at over 90%, I will focus on this particular search engine, (however they are broadly similar in the way they work).
Since the beginning, acquiring what are known as backlinks, is the holy grail of moving your site to the top. Nowadays, you need very high-quality backlinks from trustworthy sources, and this can only be achieved by having high-quality content for them to link to!
By making sure that you have a fast website host like those suggested by fortunelords.com, and create amazing posts closely related to your business, you will see your search engine rankings increasing for various keywords. For example, if you have a company that repairs swimming pools, you could write about all kinds of things, including how someone could service their own swimming pool to keep it looking great. This may sound counter-intuitive as you want their pools to break, but that leads me onto the next point.
Great blogs can make you an expert in your field
Continuing on from the swimming pool repair example, by gifting your knowledge to readers, you are turning yourself from a small business to an expert in your industry.
By making sure that people turn to your site whenever they are looking to save money on minor repairs, you will also ensure that they turn to your site when in need of more extensive repairs that they are unable to do.
This will be true for any business, by making sure to give away valuable tidbits of information, you will gain far larger business going forward. In fact, even if you directly tell a website visitor via your blog how to make or fix something themselves, you will find that most people will be either unable to do so or merely not have the time.
Therefore even when you give away information that will seemingly make you lose business, you will gain so much more when they realize that it is far easier to just hire a professional or buy a finished product!
Increase social media interaction
Everyone is using social media these days, and if you don’t have a social media presence, you are leaving money on the table. Once you have set up the relevant accounts, you will need some content to fill it up.
Social media is a different beast when it comes to promotion, as too much self-promotion can actually turn people away from your business. Nevertheless, relevant blog content that will actually improve your followers’ lives will make sure that they stick around and hopefully even share your posts to a broader audience.
While you may not get direct business from social media, you will get free word of mouth promotion and access to a vastly wider audience than you could have done by yourself. Again, it is worthwhile sharing relevant industry posts alongside your own so that you don’t create self-promotion fatigue among your followers.
Still, once you have established yourself as an expert, you will find more and more people willing to share and discuss your business.
Need an example of relevant posts that create a buzz around the product? Just following anything that Red Bull does, and you will see how they have managed to master social media by directly connected the focus needed for adventure and their drink!
Build an email list
The money is in the list, that is what everyone says. However, it is accurate, and by building out an email list, you will be able to promote your products and services to previous visitors to your website.
Instead of a former customer or client using you one time and then leaving forever, you will reconnect with them, thus keeping a “hot” client. Blogging improves your email list in two distinct ways.
- Blogging will improve your SEO as discussed earlier and get people to actually visit your website where it is then possible to collect their name and email address.
- By creating detailed and fresh, new content, you can gather it all into a newsletter and occasionally send it to those who have signed up and therefore shown an interest in your company.
Every company should have an email list, but you cannot blindly ask your visitors to signup for nothing. It is only from the trust that people will give away their email address, and blogging will help prove your worthiness to potential customers.
Increase the time on your site
If your website looks great and your content valuable, you might find that the time your customers spend on your site increases.
Why is this important? Dwell time is vitally important to boost sales. By keeping potential customers on your website for longer, you vastly increase the chance to either buy something or even buy much more than they otherwise might have. If you are smart about interlinking relevant prices of information to the related products or services, you can perhaps double your revenue quickly, all from blogging.
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