Top 8 Reasons You Should Be Blogging

Top 8 Reasons to Blog

Provide valuable, engaging content for your target audience

Regardless of your industry, the primary goal of a business blog is to create value for your target audience. Your content should be relevant and informative on an industry level; it shouldn’t just be about what you do or sell.

Engage your prospects and clients with content that addresses solutions to their pain points. Provide content that will help them solve their problems. Don’t tell them why your coffee shop is the best. Instead, tell them the 10 ways coffee is good for your health (and for all of our productivity). If a visitor finds value from the content on your blog, there’s a good chance they’ll find value in your business, too.

Position your business as an industry expert

This is about putting quality educational content on your blog. Take advantage of internal resources at your business with vast technical or industry knowledge. Pick their brains. Their insight will help you create industry-relevant blogs, share valuable best practices and help guide your prospects—which will help position your blog as the go-to resource for answers to your audience’s questions. Not only will it help your prospects (in that they’ll learn something of value), but it will also go a long way in establishing your business as a thought leader in your industry.

Stand out among the competition

Real talk, there are a LOT of business blogs out there. The good news is that many of them aren’t as good at blogging as you will be after you finish reading this post. 🙂

But seriously. A lot of business blogs focus on overposting company news and shamelessly self-promoting their product or service. While company news can be helpful and promoting your product or service is super important (on your other website pages), your business blog will stand out if you create educational, informative content instead. Show, don’t sell.

Share your expertise and knowledge

Prospects who find value in your content likely turn into leads because you’ve already built trust and credibility with them. You’re taking the time to help them find answers to their problems rather than pitching them a straight-up advertisement. Engaging your audience with educational content will not only build your street cred as an industry resource, but it will also help your prospects through their buying journey—leading them to ultimately become customers.

Improve your search engine rankings

…And we’re not just saying that because we like SEO here at AVAIRY. A regularly updated blog is a great way to boost your website traffic and improve your search engine rank. According to Hubspot, companies that blog earn 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages on average (!). Why? Because a blog increases your indexable pages (aka gives more pages for Google to provide to searchers) and it’s a great platform for keyword-optimized content.

Pro Tip: don’t overdo the keywords. Blog post headlines, URLs and image alt tags should all have keywords (ideally one targeted long-tail keyword relevant to each specific post), but use them sparingly in the body copy of your blog posts.

As your blog traffic increases, other people will often link to your pages on their websites—which means more inbound links that establish your business’s website authority with search engines AND more referral traffic for your business.

Plus, a blog gives you a wealth of content to share across your social channels. Which brings us to…

***drum roll***

Create timely, relevant content that you can share on social media

So you posted a blog. Well done, you!

But to REALLY get your business blog to the next level, you shouldn’t stop there—share your posts across your social channels. Shout it from the digital mountaintops! And make it easy for your blog visitors to do the same. Include social share buttons on your blog posts so your audience can share on their own channels. This will get more eyeballs on your blog and help increase your post’s reach to potential leads.

Shameless self-promotion on a blog is bad. Shameless cross-promotion on a blog, however, is good. Sharing on social media maximizes your blog posts’ reach—and helps drive traffic to your website.

Turn website prospects into leads

Remember waaaay back at the beginning of this post when we said that the goal is to engage your audience one-on-one through content? Engaging visitors with valuable content is the start of the beautiful relationship between your audience and your brand. And a helpful way to develop that relationship is to include calls-to-action (CTAs) on your blog. Put a subscribe form on your posts so people who love your blog can get new posts right in their email inbox.

Do you have a super awesome ebook, webinar or other premium content? Promote it within your blog posts. Include CTAs to download these content offers in your blog posts (but make sure the offer is relevant to that post…the goal is to provide value for the people visiting your site, not to bombard your readers with forms).

These CTAs should lead to a landing page that requires the visitor to enter at least their name, company and email address (in other words, gate it behind a form). Why take this extra step? For lead capture, of course! Any time someone submits a form on these gated offers, you have the opportunity to nurture that lead into a customer.

Engage, educate and entertain existing customers (and turn them into brand advocates)

Your blog isn’t just for attracting new people to your site (though that is an important piece). It’s also a great place to engage, educate and entertain your existing customers, too. Share your insight, knowledge, and expertise. Provide content that’s valuable for customers so you’re continually building that relationship.

The best advocates of your brand are your existing customers, so keep their needs in mind for your blogging strategy so they’ll tell other people how awesome your business is.

Bottom line, there are a lot of benefits to blogging.

It can be a lot of work to create and sustain a business blog. But it’s worth it, because a quality (and consistently updated) blog drives traffic to your website, builds the relationship between you and your prospects/leads/clients, positions your business as an industry thought leader AND helps generate new leads.

So take your business to the next level. Get out there and start blogging!

Need help with your marketing efforts? Take a look at AVAIRY’s services!