It’s Never Too Late to Remember the “Why” Behind Blogging for Business

“Raise your hand if you want more website visitors,” says Corey Eridon of hubspot.com.  Now think about the way people find your website, he continues. They could type your name right in, but that’s an audience you already have. You could pay for traffic by buying an email list (don’t you dare, he adds), but that’s expensive and illegal. You could pay for traffic by placing paid ads, but even though that’s not illegal, it’s expensive.  So, how can you drive traffic? Blogging, social media, and search engines.

As a longtime blog content writer and corporate blogging trainer, I love Eridon’s very simple breakdown of the reason blogging works: “Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website.  It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published…”.

Blogging also helps keep your social media presence going, Eridon adds.  Instead of having a social media manager come up with brand new original content or creating that content yourself, your blog can serve as that repository of content.

What’s more, since the best business blogs answer common questions, consistently creating content that’s helpful to the target customers, Eridon explains, blogging helps establish the business owner or professional as an authority on the subject.

It was very interesting to me to read a comment posted on Corey Erison’s blog by a Scott de Long.  At Say It For You, I’m always talking about the “training benefit” of blogging, and while de Long doesn’t call it that, he “gets” my concept. “The purpose is to present our people as experts, or at least well informed, but the real benefit comes from the research they do to become better informed,” de Long says.

In fact, there are four unique benefits that come from blogging:

• The SEO benefit – The more relevant content you have up about your business, the greater the chance that people will find you via search engines.
• The promotional benefit – The content in the blog exists to promote your business, your products and services, and you as the business owner.
• The credibility benefit – Your blog says a lot of positive things about you and your business. It says that you are in the 21st century and interested in using the latest tools to communicate with your customers.
• The training benefit – When you blog, you are constantly providing yourself with training about how to talk effectively about your business.

It’s never too late to remind yourself just why it’s worth blogging for business!