Your business needs a blog because it helps you get more customers. No, owning a small business is not about just getting more customers; you are passionate about what you do and are dedicated to your community. But your business grows because of its customers. And your customers reap the benefits when your business grows. Put another way: Blogging for your small business increases and enhances engagements with people most in need of your service. In this post we’ll take a closer look at exactly how blogging fuels this mutually beneficial exchange, which ultimately helps your business to get more customers.
1. Blogging Strengthens Your Brand
Your business website is an essential tool for providing information to your current and potential customers: where you are located, what services you provide, how you can be contacted. However, you don’t only want to provide information to visitors; you want to provide an experience for visitors. With so much logistical information to provide and so little space on your homepage, it can be hard for your business’s personality and voice to shine through.
Blogging helps a business to get more customers by helping to provide the experience that you want visitors to your website to have—the experience that sets your business apart from competitors and makes an impression on people. By using a consistent tone and voice—a business blogging basic—you can develop your brand identity and make clear to your customers the personality and values of your company. The more that people can feel personally connected to your business, the more likely they are to become customers.
2. Blogging Increases Your Online Visibility
A greater online presence affords your business more opportunities to express its personality, and also more eyes on your brand. The more people are exposed to your business, and the more familiar they become with your business, the more likely they are to become customers.
Blogging helps a business to get more customers by increasing its online presence. First of all, your business website has a limited number of pages, such as the homepage, an “about” page, a products/services/pricing page, and a contact page. However, with a blog, every post counts as a page. The more pages you have, the greater the chances you have of being discovered by potential customers searching online.
Second, if another blogger, local media outlet or larger organization finds one of your blog posts to be helpful, they may include a link to your post in their content. This is called backlinking, and it now puts you in front of their target audience as well. Expanding your reach to a relevant audience greatly increases your chances of obtaining more customers.
Third, blogging yields content that can be shared. By sharing your blog through social media posts and via email, you can greatly amplify the number of people who see your post. Each new person who reads your post is another introduction made to your business—and another potential customer.
3. A Blog Helps Establish Your Business as an Industry Leader
Establishing your expertise within your industry is a great way to attract more customers to your business. Providing useful information to your target audience will earn their trust while at the same time showing your value. However, you only have so much space on your business website to show how much you know and prove that you can be trusted.
A blog, on the other hand, provides a platform to continuously showcase your knowledge and show visitors that you are there to help. Through it you can become a trusted go-to resource for people in need of your service. They may use one of your blog posts to do something on their own, but when it comes to a greater task that they aren’t able to do, they already have a trusted resource in their head that they will turn to. If you’ve helped them in the past, they are more likely to turn to you in the future. Blogging helps you to get more customers by establishing trust and keeping you top of mind with your target audience.
4. Blogging Boosts SEO
Blogging does not get you more customers through informative content alone. You need the people who are searching for the information to find it in the first place; and if your website shows up on 7th page of Google search results, let alone the 2nd, it is unlikely to get seen.
A blog can help your business to improve its rank on search engine results pages. Search engine optimization requires several efforts over a period of time, but blogging can help facilitate the process. First because search engines like websites that have a strong online presence and produce fresh content—two things that a blog can provide. Second because search engines also place high value on relevancy. Blogging gives you more opportunities to put keywords into your content, which will help Google to serve up your content to people searching for it.
5. Blogging Increases Website Traffic
Increasing traffic to your website can bring in more leads and potential customers. People can go to your site by typing your address into the search bar, but that requires them to know you exist, and to know your website address. What about all of the other people out there who don’t know that you exist?
Here’s where blogging helps your business. Each blog post is an additional channel by which people can arrive at your website and discover your business—not because they knew to look for your business specifically, but because they were searching for information that your blog post provided. Blogging helps your business to get more customers because it not only brings more people to your website, it brings in people who are interested in your products or services. By sharing your blog posts on social media and with your email list, you can further increase website traffic.
Using your online presence and expertise, you can strengthen your brand messaging and familiarize people with your business. Blogging is like the glue that binds these efforts together, ultimately connecting your business to more people who are looking for it. So do your business and your customers a favor, and start blogging!
