Some small business owners that are pressed for time question whether or not maintaining a blog is worthwhile. If you have simply started a basic business blog and haven’t updated it with new content in several months, it’s likely that your business is receiving little to not benefit from having a blog. However, if you approach your content marketing blog the right way, you will be sure to see results in terms of increased traffic to your website, improved search rankings, and heightened awareness of your brand.
There are three basic ways that traffic is driven to your website: search engines, social media, and blogging. Since this article is about using a content marketing blog to help grow your small business, let’s focus on the blogging aspect. Here are several benefits that your business will realize by starting and maintaining a blog:
1. You’ll drive more traffic to your website.
Take a good look at your current website. It’s likely that your website does not contain a lot of pages. It’s also likely that you don’t regularly update the various pages on your site. If you have a blog, however, you are creating an additional indexed page every time you write a blog post. This sends a signal to search engines that your website is very active and that it should be checked regularly for new content. The more indexed pages that you have on your website, the more opportunities you are creating for traffic to be directed to your website.
2. You can use your blog as a tool for qualifying leads.
Not all traffic that arrives at your website is your ideal traffic. To help qualify leads, make it a best practice to include a relevant call-to-action in every blog post that you write. The most effective types of calls-to-action are free ebooks, whitepapers, and webinars that entice your visitors to share their contact information with you in exchange for more detailed information about a topic that they are genuinely interested in. Not only will this help to qualify your leads, but it will also give you a better understanding of where these leads are in your buyer journey.
3. Your blog can help to position you as an authority in your industry.
The more often you create content that is helpful to your target audience, the faster they will come to think of you as an authority in your industry. If you are the manager of an apartment community, for example, you could regularly post about the best local date night spots or bucket list activities to do in your area. These posts will help to highlight the fantastic location that your apartment community is located in, and people will return to your website time and time again to learn more about what there is to do in the area.
Making the decision to establish a content marketing blog will yield longterm results as long as you are consistent with publishing new content that provides value to your audience. If you are currently tossing around the idea of starting a blog for your business, download our free ebook that will walk you through the steps of how to how to start a business blog the right way.
