How business blogging grows your business.
More than a decade-and-a-half ago, blogging transitioned from a mere hobby or an AdSense money making tool to business branding platform.
Almost every mainstream business has a blog these days.
You may like to read: 10 Beginners Tips for Business Blogging.
Most businesses claim that they publish blogs regularly because they want to provide useful information to their visitors and customers & clients and also to keep them engaged.
This is a very good reason, but in reality, most of the businesses publish blogs because blogging improves their search engine rankings. Hence, it is a multi-pronged benefit.
In this blog post I would quickly like to discuss how blogging helps you grow your business. The post is inspired by another blog post published on Entrepreneur.com, titled 5 ways to grow your business through blogging.
Blogging improves your SEO
There are multiple reasons why blogging is good for your SEO, assuming you blog regularly. Here are some reasons:
- Blogging platforms like WordPress are structured in such a manner that they make your content search engine friendly.
- Individual blog post is also structured in a search engine friendly manner as it has the main title, headings and subheadings and categorization.
- Writing and publishing new and fresh content is easier using a blogging tool like WordPress and hence, you don’t need a web designer to add new posts or edit existing posts. It means there is a greater incentive to publish regularly and without much fuss.
- Since you can write and publish new and fresh content you are constantly providing Google and other search engines new content to crawl, index and rank.
- Search engine crawlers can access every single blog post from your homepage (provided you haven’t taken extra measures to prevent this from happening).
- Interlinking to other blog posts makes it easier for search engine crawlers to jump to different portions of your business blog.
- Since you’re constantly publishing interesting and useful information, other bloggers and website owners have a reason to link to you, improving your SEO in the process.
So, writing and publishing regularly on your business blog is good for your SEO and when your search engine rankings improve, especially when they improve for your targeted keywords and search terms, your business grows.
Business blogging increases your direct traffic
One of the biggest benefits of regularly publishing a business blog is that it increases your search engine traffic, but additionally, it also increases your direct traffic.
As mentioned above, other bloggers and website owners link to your blog or individual blog posts.
For example, American Express publishes Open Forum and I have linked to this business blog multiple times from my website.
Hence, when you regularly publish valuable and link-worthy content many high traffic websites link to your website or blog, and in this way, you get direct traffic from there.
Sometimes even mainstream journalists find the information on your website useful and from their articles, they link to your website, generating more direct traffic in the process.
Business blogging increases your newsletter subscribers
There are multiple reasons why your newsletter subscribers increase when you publish valuable and useful content on your business blog. These are
- They don’t want to miss out when you publish fresh content.
- More people coming to your blog through search engine traffic as well as direct traffic means more people subscribing to your newsletter.
- The blog content can be repurposed as newsletter content, attracting more subscribers.
Publishing a regular newsletter has proven to be one of the most potent marketing tools to grow your business.
Business blogging increases your social media engagement
When you publish a blog post on your blog you can share the link on your social media profiles. This in turn creates buzz.
There are many businesses who simply post content directly on their social media timelines. There is no harm in it but when you first publish useful and authoritative content on your business blog and then you encourage people to talk about your content on social media, it establishes your authority and when you establish your authority, people develop interest in your capabilities and they pay more attention to what you say.
How to build a successful business blog?
To build a successful business blog, you need to do the following:
- Write high-quality, useful blog posts.
- Stick to a publishing schedule.
- Publish regularly – maybe three blog posts every week.
- Market your content – use your social media profiles and your newsletter to let people know that you are publishing new blog posts.
The most fundamental thing you can do is publish regularly. This I have observed across the spectrum. Even if the design is not great. Even if you’re not very active on social media. Provided you publish great content and publish it regularly, your business blog is going to succeed.