Clik here to view.
We started the series by defining what blogging was and wasn’t. The next step is to explain the benefits of business blogging, and there are plenty. If this post doesn’t at least convince you to look into blogging then you’re really not interested and future parts of the series won’t do you any good.
| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  |
1. Business Blogging can help you get more business. Studies have shown some amazing things. In this infographic for instance you see that there’s a higher percentage of business leads if a business has a blog from both consumers and other businesses. On top of that, 46% of businesses with blogs reported getting a customer because of it, and out of that figure, 57% of the business came from consumers while 43% of it came from other businesses.
2. Business Blogging helps you show your expertise. Businesses write on what they know, and even those businesses that might worry that they’re giving too much away can alter some of their information and still prove to be experts in their field. There are so many choices in most industries to choose from and sales pitches start sounding the same. Having a blog with your voice and your information gives potential consumers an opportunity to learn more about you and helps you stand out from the crowd.
3. Business Blogging gives you a voice within your industry. There are some interesting statistics regarding the types of people who are behind blogs these days. One stat is that over the past two years 65% more small businesses have started blogs; that brings the overall percentage of small businesses with blogs to 13%. Strangely enough, 67% of business bloggers are men. Around 35% of these bloggers have a household income of $75,000 a year, 25% a household income of $100,000. And get this; 79% of these bloggers have college degrees. It’s estimated that 43% of U.S. companies will be blogging by the end of 2012.
4. You can market from your blog. This one almost didn’t need to be said, but it’s true. Blogs are a natural sales funnel if done right. No one wants to be constantly bombarded by sales messages from a blog. But mentioning a new product or service that’s coming out is easier to do on the fly and certainly more cost effective than traditional means. You can also build interest in what’s coming before you even get there, possibly float the balloon to see if there’s a potential market or not.
5. If attached to your website, Business Blogging will help your SEO. Two months ago I addressed the question of how long it takes SEO to happen on one’s website or blog. I mentioned that one could have positive results in a couple of months. I can talk about it a bit more specifically now based on a case study I did with this blog and website.
I started this blog on August 13th of this year. The tool of measure I used was Alexa, which measures traffic to websites. Some people will put down Alexa but the truth is that it’s as good a tool as any other to help measure the visibility of one’s website or blog when the numbers move drastically. On August 13th this website’s rank was 2,741,051. As of today it’s Alexa rank is 420,074. That’s a significant jump no matter who’s looking at it. This is by making sure I have a new blog post once every 3 days, which is my main goal for this blog. I had one post at 4 days and one at 2 days, but every other post has been the 3rd day. Studies have proven that the more new content one puts on their site on a continual basis the higher their website’s ranking will be, so imagine where this site’s ranking would be if I wrote something daily, or even 5 days a week.
Also, on the day I started this blog, I came up with 36 search terms I thought I might be able to rank for or should rank for. On that day I was found for only 13 of them, with the highest ranking coming in at 25 on Google. As of two weeks ago, when I put together my presentation for the social media conference, I was being found for 23 of those search terms, with 4 of them showing up on the first page, or the top 10 if you will.
Let me add this. If you don’t want to trust Alexa you can always go back and check your Google Analytics if you’ve added it to your website to track your traffic. Since adding the blog my traffic has gone up 64% from where it was previously and my bounce rate went down 13%. Bounce rate refers to the action people take after visiting your website or blog. If it’s high it means people are leaving your site almost as soon as they get there or aren’t going any further than the page they’re on. If it’s lower it means people are sticking around and checking out other things on your site.
This shows the power of content and the potential power of blogging. I make sure all topics are geared towards this business. My blog sits on my business website so I get full benefit from it, instead of using a free service. It costs nothing to add a blog and it takes nothing except a little bit of time to maintain a blog. Even writing once every two weeks will give you some kind of benefit, although it’ll be less dramatic than what I’ve achieved.
Benefits to business blogging; you’d better believe it! Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Copyrighted content by SEO Xcellence © 2011