The Business of Blogging

November 10, 2015

As a business, you may have given consideration to running a blog on your website. Though perhaps you are not yet sure what a blog is, or even the purpose of having one. From its first appearance around 1998, the shortened term ‘blog’ gained its name from the term ‘web log’. Originating as a personal journal, blogs have moved on significantly since then and have become a key tool in marketing strategy.

Here are 5 simple reasons why we at Venture Stream suggest your business should have one:

1. Drive new, quality traffic to your website
Every business wants more web traffic, right? For every blog post created, new content appears on your site resulting in another indexed page which is more likely to show up on search engine results pages (SERPs) and drive traffic to your site organically. Organic traffic means you appear in search listings without having to pay for the privilege. By driving more traffic to your site there are greater opportunities to achieve the set goals of your business, whether this be sales or lead generation. The benefit of achieving organic traffic is that it is more likely to be quality traffic with people who are more likely to engage, resulting in a more worthwhile and successful relationship.

2. Establish your business as an authority in your field
Creating helpful content for your customers will set you up as an authority in your field. In terms of looking at blogging for your business, you want your blog posts to relate to a specific topic about your trade. Once your customers start finding answers to the questions they are looking for, they are more likely to return to your site and can potentially become sales leads for your business, as their confidence in your brand increases. Not to mention, the search engines love to see authoritative content that is unique to the search customer, this helps to be found organically.

3. Communicate with your customers and build relationships
Until the creation and popularity of social media, brands and businesses sustained a considerable distance away from their customers. Handling complaints and requests for more information was a very long process, but now your customers can easily and instantly contact to you through your social media channels. As a business, responding and maintaining this contact is the best thing you can do for your business. Customers want real people talking to them, they want to feel like there is a relationship between brand and customer and they want to a connection. Using your blog and associated social media channels will help open up the conversation through the comments section, encouraging engagement between yourselves and potential customers, thus increasing your authority.

4. Use your blog to create content for your other social channels
Using your blog content across your social channels will help increase your authority and keep your social media channels updated and fresh. By posting the content on social media, you are offering your followers the chance to share your content. This helps reach a new audience, especially if it continues to be shared by multiple networks. Blogs are a great way to get the nature of your business and all that you do out there into the public domain, as well as help the growth of your company through brand awareness.

5. Long term benefits
A single blog post isn’t just for the here and now, it is forever. Once you have created some content and published it to your blog, it remains online indefinitely. So anyone searching for keywords that you are covering in your post, may discover your blog post months or years after you have originally written it. Keep this in mind when you originally post your content by carrying out some Keyword Research to ensure the titles of your posts are informative and related exactly to what the post is about. And if you get stuck for inspiration, try out a Blog Topic Generator to get you started. You want your titles to be as closely written to what people are genuinely searching for, this increase the chances of your content being found, especially when your content is topical. Think about including a Call to Action on every blog post (i.e. tells us your thoughts in the comments below), you want to generate engagement and sometimes your readers need a little push. Every so often, refresh your content to extend its shelf-life, and helping your content to be found more easily by search engines at the same time.

Still unsure on how to go about setting up your own blog?

Send us a tweet or comment below, or for those traditionalists out there, give us a call on 0191 5800 696 or drop us an email and we’re happy to help!