Business Blogging for Marketing: Is It Worth the Effort?

Hey! I’m guessing you arrived here from Google, or perhaps through one of our social media posts? Is this your first visit to our blog? Then welcome, you my friend are at the “awareness” stage (more on that later).

If you’ve been here before, then hello old friend, here’s to another one of our great memories together.

Do you want to find out why blogging plays a central part in the inbound marketing methodology? Do you want to learn how blogging benefits business growth? Are you interested in discovering why blogging is essential for nurturing customer relationships, boosting SEO performance and driving traffic to your website? Am I just asking you questions so I can integrate long tail keywords?

Of course not… (I absolutely am!)

As a lover of words, it’s my passion to engage you for long enough to help you answer these questions. Since “help” entails a significant degree of trust and authenticity, it seemed only right that I was honest. Another confession I have to make is that I don’t usually write in the 1st person. Although, writing a blog about writing blogs is a bit of a busman's holiday, so I thought I’d keep it genuine.

I’m not saying we’ll be best buddies by the time you’ve read the conclusion, but I hope you’ll leave knowing how blogging can help your business growth and feel like we’ve connected on some level. Who knows where it could lead to?...

What is a blog?

The word “blog” probably makes you think of that travel writer who keeps popping up on your news feed from exotic locations. You know, the one who invites you to take 2 minutes out of your 9-5 to gaze into their hedonism. But actually, “a blog is a website with frequently updated content about a specific keyword - or topic-oriented topic.” It just so happens that our indulgence in those making a living from sipping cocktails on the beach is making travel bloggers quite popular.

There are blogs for all things imaginable:

• Are you an expecting mother looking for advice on how to raise a newborn? There’s a blog for that.
• Are you in the market for a new mobile phone? There’s a blog for that.
• Are you a Senior Marketing Officer looking to find out why blogging is so important for business growth?

There’s a…. Get the point?

Regardless of the type, all blogs have one thing in common. They are focused on helping their readers. The travel blogger cures your wanderlust. The mum blogger teaches you how to raise a newborn. And I am going to help you understand the business benefits of blogging.

“Okay, so who reads blogs?”

Despite what you might think, it’s not only potential customers who are reading your blog. In fact, as I’m writing this now, there’s one entity I’m keeping in mind more than you (sorry had to be honest), Google. Search engines like Google "read" blogs to learn what your website is about, so they know whether they can return any of your website pages to their users who perform searches.

For example, 3 minutes ago you might have been swivelling in your chair thinking, “I wonder if we should start a business blog.” If so, then you probably went straight to Google and typed in something like “How does blogging benefit my business.” In this instance, Google reads our website so it knows it can return this blog and that means my hard work has paid off.

“But my potential customers don’t read blogs…”

Stop right there my friend! You might be right to say that your potential customers don't subscribe to blogs. But that doesn't mean they don't stumble upon blog posts when they're doing research online.

For example, when I was looking to buy a new TV, I went to Google to perform some research to figure out what my best option would be. I learned from technology bloggers what my best options were, and then went to make a purchase based off their advice. I don't subscribe to any of those tech blogs and I may not always even realise what I'm reading is a "blog" - but I use blogs to figure out where I want to spend my money.

“So why does blogging work to grow your business?”

Because blogging helps you grow traffic and trust. Let me breakdown what I mean by each of those.

Blogging helps you drive more traffic to your website

You can think of blogging a bit like fishing. The more hooks you have in the water, the more likely you are to catch a fish. In the same way, as you add more content to your site, more pages from your website domain become indexed in search engines. This improves organic search visibility and increases website traffic. Every new page you publish is like dropping another hook in the water.

For example, every time I write a blog post on this very blog about inbound marketing, it creates an opportunity for someone that needs help with inbound marketing to find that post about inbound marketing, and learn what RevM is. The more blog posts I create, the more chances I have to introduce someone new to RevM. Each new blog you publish is another new opportunity to get your website found online.

The possibilities are endless

Unlike other parts of your website, blogging as a format provides those opportunities by the bucket load. That's because there’s only so many pages you can really have on your website. You’ll likely have an “About Us” page, a “Products/Services” page, a “Contact us” page and perhaps a “Jobs” page. Sure, you could stretch this out to a few more topics specific to your business, but soon you’re going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

With a blog you have endless opportunities to create new page URLs that can be ranked in search and discovered by people that were previously unaware of your business. Typically, websites that have a blog have 434% more indexed pages.

More indexed pages is great, but when you can start cross linking between them, that’s when the magic really happens. Concerned about the impact GDPR will have on your inbound marketing? We can help with that. Interested in seeing the benefits a CRM can have on your sales team? We can help with that. Wondering what the future of inbound marketing will look like? We help with that. And yes, that was three sneaky attempts at guiding you to other areas of this blog.

When you link internally in your content you’re telling the search engine that the target of your link is so relevant and important that you want your visitor to simply be able to click a link and go straight there. This sends a signal to both the reader and the search engine that the content you’re linking to is really good. Readers want that, and search engines will reward you by increasing your page authority. Helping your reader, helps your SEO, which helps your customers stay on your website for longer while they view multiple pages.

The readers you want, all day long

As I pointed out at the beginning, if this is your first visit to our blog, then you are at the “awareness stage”. That means you had a problem, you looked to solve that problem through reading this blog and now you are aware of RevM, and how we might help you solve your problem. Suppose I hadn’t written this blog, you might never have heard of RevM.  See how it works?...

Conversely to the traffic jam you may have been stuck in earlier, traffic to your website is good. And blogging helps you get the best traffic. How? Because you can write about things that will bring in the type of lead you want to sell to.

A travel blogger will tell you how much they’re enjoying the Costa del Sol because they want to bring in the type of lead interested in vacationing in the Costa del Sol.

We blog about inbound marketing because we specialise in doing inbound marketing. Blogging helps you tailor the audience you bring in to your website, so they're people that would conceivably purchase your product or service.

Blogging helps you establish trust

Who would you rather trust to buy a car from… Someone that’s taken the time to educate you about cars by providing free, unbiased, educational content, or someone that you’ve never met or spoken to before in your entire life?

The former right?

Blogging helps put you in that camp. People tend to buy from people they know and trust. If you can earn their trust by providing quality content that they want then the likelihood of that person buying from you is greatly increased.

Considering that only a mere 3% of people consider salespeople to be trustworthy, creating content that helps answer questions for your target audience, or the persona of your ideal customer has never been so important. Simply because it establishes a trusting relationship and makes them more comfortable investing in you as a business partner or solution provider.

Look, traffic and trust are nice, but what I really want are leads

That’s exactly what blogging helps you get!

According to HubSpot, B2B marketers that rely on blogs get 67% more leads than those that do not use blogs. Just as blogging opens up opportunities to bring in new traffic, it also represents an opportunity to generate a new lead too.

If you write a blog post that 100 people will read, you have 100 opportunities to turn those readers into leads by putting a call-to-action on that blog post. That call-to-action is anything that asks the reader to exchange their contact information for something like a free ebook, a free checklist, a free consultation, etc.

Since you’ve read this far I’m guessing you’re pretty serious to explore the benefits of inbound marketing. After you’ve finished reading this you might want to learn more about inbound marketing and see what else we can help you with. If so, you can find a call-to-action at the end of this blog that directs you to a page on our website where you can discover more about inbound marketing. That would make you a lead and who knows, if you really like what you see, potentially one of our customers.

“Is blogging really the gift that keeps on giving?”

It certainly is my friend.

Once you publish a blog post, it's out there on the internet working to bring in new traffic and leads forever. So if you’re reading this blog and the year is 2023, then let’s be honest, inbound marketing is probably ruling the world. Millennials far and wide are smiling at their computer screens at the pure delight of all the helpful brands holding their hand through the customer journey.

Okay, maybe a slight exaggeration, but the point is people can still find this post in search engines like Google, or even on social media so long as people are sharing it. That truth will remain until the day the internet ends./p>

Blogging can literally help you generate leads for your business while you sleep. The work you put in today can generate results for years to come. Compare that to Pay-Per-Click (PPC), whereby you pay a publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) when the ad that you’re featuring on their website is clicked. This might drive some traffic to your website through increasing online visibility, but when you turn off the money, you can say good night to your traffic and leads.

Persistence is key

Blogging is like joining the gym to embark on a weight loss regime. Sure, that first session might leave you feeling great, you might see a minor improvement, but unless you keep going back regularly, you’re not going to see any major changes. In much the same way, If you publish one blog today, it might drive, say, 50 visits. That’s great, but it’ll trickle off over time to say, 10 visits month over month, which can seem depressing after that initial traffic influx.

That's why just as you don’t measure your weight loss progress each time you visit the gym, you don't look at individual blog post performance in silo either. Instead, look at the gains your blog posts make over time as you publish post after post after post, those visits will stack on top of each other as they rank in search. Now you have a diverse portfolio that's driving consistent returns month after month - with no extra work on your part.

Conclusion

You came here today to find out how blogging benefits business growth. I hope you’re leaving with the answers, since it was my goal to help you find those answers. Or should I say, It was my goal to help Google help you find those answers.

Now that I’ve helped you, I hope you trust me more than when you did at the start when I told that little white lie about keyword optimisation.

By putting this post out there amongst the 2 million+ blogs that are published each day, I have gained one more opportunity for introducing RevM to one of the 3.74 billion internet users like yourself. But persistence is key, we have many problems to solve for people who may be unaware of the benefits inbound marketing can have on their business. That’s why we won’t stop here.

We know that visibility is key to getting leads, and leads are key to getting customers. Traffic is the oxygen of the internet. If you can drive enough of it to your website, you’re halfway there. The more pages you have out there, the more authority you’ll have in your industry and the better chance you’ll be found.

Once I’m finished here, I’ll post it on social media and maybe you will like it and maybe I’ll poke you. See how it works? Then we’ll be like Facebook friends or something. That way next time I publish a blog, you might come back for another visit and I can say hello old friend.