My Financial Broker is a credit broker and not a lender. Warning: Late repayments can cause you serious money problems. For help, go to https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/
In January, we often make resolutions for the year ahead. These can be personal or professional, big or small. And while common goals include getting fit and learning a new language, perhaps it’s time to think about blogging! On a personal level, blogging can be a great way to creatively express yourself. On a professional level, this is also true, but the big draw is that starting a blog may lead to an increase in revenue.
Blogging can get more online visibility for your organisation, and in a similar way to social media, can help support business growth. A blog should drive traffic to your website, as well as increase your brand awareness. Blogging also comes with the benefit of being a cheap marketing strategy.
So if your company doesn’t currently have a blog, perhaps that should change! We’ve explored some of the advantages of blogging for business below:
Just about every business wants more traffic on their website. And while paid advertising is an effective way to drive more traffic to your site, it’s also expensive. Some paid options are cheaper than others (PPC is less costly than television advertising, for instance) but blogging will almost certainly be cheaper.
The question is, how does a blog lead to more traffic? The answer is SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation. As the name suggests, this is where you modify your website, to make it more appealing to search engines such as Google. Things like using relevant keywords, publishing engaging content, and offering an outstanding user experience are all things that will boost your SEO, and hopefully mean you rank higher in search results.
When it comes to blog posts, not only can you use keywords to get your page noticed by search engines, but each post is another indexed page on your website. This matters because the more indexed pages you have, the better chance you have of showing up on search engine results pages.
Through blogging, you can see long term SEO results. This means that, to an extent, you can sit back and let the traffic come to you. Say you published a blog post, and within the first day, this generated you a few hundred views and about twenty leads. You may get less views and a handful of leads the next day, when people come across your blog on social media. This little splash will soon die down, but remember that the post is now ranking.
What does this mean for you? Essentially, the blog post will continue to drive traffic to your site for months and years to come. And when you take into account all the other posts you publish, over time, you should be getting increased traffic with little to no effort on your part.
Even if you don’t already have a blog, your business probably has social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Coming up with content ideas, especially if you’re posting frequently, can be challenging. But if you create a blog, you’ll instantly have topics to discuss on social media.
It’s also good to bear in mind that engaging blog posts are something that are likely to be shared on social media. A social post telling people about your latest software innovation, while interesting, doesn’t have much re-readability value. But a blog post exploring software developments over the years could be something that people want to share with others, and refer back to at a later date.
Link building can be another way to improve your SEO. It’s one of the most difficult things about Search Engine Optimisation though, as you basically have no control over other companies putting links to your site in their content. But linking to other sites can also help improve your domain authority, and putting these links in blogs is one of the simplest ways to go about this.
Linking to authoritative sites, which are usually the bigger names in your industry, signals to your audience, as well as Google, that you know what you’re talking about, and are a trustworthy source yourself.
Your brand awareness can be a powerful tool. If you think about it, it makes sense – when people know about your brand, they are more likely to consider your company when purchasing the products or services you offer. Part of brand awareness is just getting your name out there, but you also need to try and humanise your brand.
Your blog can be a great place to do this – you can share news about your company, such as new hires and case studies you’ve undertaken. Any events you’re attending, or even hosting, can additionally be posted on your blog. This sort of news furthermore shows your audience that your business isn’t solely focused on selling – you’re also experts in your industry.