Blah Blah Blog – Should Your Business Start One?

Bloggers are no longer stay at home moms and people looking for some extra cash. Businesses are blogging for a variety of reasons. Wonder if you should be blogging?

Learn what blogging can do to set you apart from your competition, increase awareness to the online community, and what approach you should take to meet your online marketing goals.

Build Trust – Put a Face and Voice to Your Brand

Nowadays it is extremely hard to gain online consumers’ trust – people are skeptical of big businesses who have no face for the company. By providing people, and possibly future customers, with consistent, truthful, and helpful content, that gap between distrust and trust will slowly disappear. It will take time for your blog to gain followers, so don’t lose faith if after your first post you don’t have thousands of shares or comments.

Since one of the first steps in the buying process for potential customers is to hear what has been said about your brand and products, let them peek inside your company and get to know how your products work, what others have said, special benefits, and more. Once you gain a following, give your loyal fans insights into new products that are going to be launched in the future or special pricing or sales. This not only lets your readers know you care about them, but also that you appreciate their time and future business.

Increase Traffic and Rankings

Did you know that blog posts can be indexed in Google in as little as 24 hours?

Having a blog allows your business to add content on a regular basis and those search engine spiders love to crawl sites that provide fresh and new content. Depending on your choice of keywords in your blog, blogging can result in a large amount of traffic to your website. And what does a large amount of traffic to your site mean?

More leads! More sales! As your posts increase, so will your overall traffic.

Each time a blog post is added to your site, your site grows, meaning that more pages are being indexed by Google and rankings can increase based on the increase in fresh, authoritative content. Once you gain that large following, people will naturally want to talk about your interesting posts, which leads us to the wonderful world of link building!

Become a Link Magnet

In the world of Google today (and quite possibly a long time in the future), quality links are the #1 factor to show your authority on the Internet. Inbound links can be thought of as “votes” to your online presence.

Welcome to the virtual popularity contest! Go back to the days of high school and join that super-cool, ever-popular crowd. To make sure you get votes in Google’s popularity contest, make sure you fill your posts with quality, resourceful, and educational content so that your readers won’t be able to resist the urge to share!

Get Social

We all know that Facebook and Twitter are some of the top social media platforms, but can you really describe your brand in 140 characters?

It would take me over 10 tweets to accurately describe myself, let alone a whole company! Social media is a great way to build your online presence, but having a blog to tweet about or share on your Facebook page will provide readers with a great deal of information, while also providing them a convenient way to share your content! If your post ends up going viral on these sites, you can expect an overflow of readers.

Whenever you publish a new post, be sure to tweet it, share it, or pin it to attract every possible visitor and build your brand!

Free Feedback

Just like social media, blogs are a way to connect with your current and future customers on an informal basis. By giving your customers a way to express their opinion on posts and let you know how they are feeling or thinking and allowing you to respond to those comments gives you that opportunity to build relationships.

Through your new blog, you can show your current and future customers your expertise, experience, talents, and, of course, your business to the whole online community.

What are your thoughts on business blogging? Does your business have an active blog?

Why or why not? Tell me in the comments; I’d love to hear from you!