Deeper Connection With Your Readers
Writing a blog will allow you to establish deeper, more personal connections with your readers.
Why is this important? Well, by creating stronger relationships with your readers, you’ll present yourself in a more trustworthy light. And when readers trust you, they’ll feel more inclined to purchase your advertised products or services. It’s just that simple.
Higher Search Rankings
This alone should be reason enough to start blogging. By creating (and managing) a blog, you’ll increase your exposure in the search engines. Each post will get crawled by search engine bots, at which point they will rank for relevant keywords. So when someone searches for a keyword pertaining to your post, they may stumble upon it listed in the search engines.
More Traffic
Because blogs encourage higher search rankings, they will also attract more traffic. Conventional wisdom should lead you to believe that higher search rankings means more traffic, which is the case involving blogs. By creating new posts on a regular basis, you’ll generate more traffic thanks to the higher search rankings it provides.
A study conducted by Chitka found the #1 position in Google to receive a whopping 32.5% traffic share, while the #3 position received just 11.4%. Don’t let your search rankings fall into the abyss; start blogging to maintain high rankings.
Blogs are Easy to Manage
Many newcomers assume that blogging is too difficult or too technical, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Thanks to all of the content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, managing a blog is easier than ever. It requires zero coding and graphic design experience/knowledge.
As long as you understand the basic concepts behind a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor, you should have no problem managing a blog. Of course, if you wish to venture into some of the more technical elements of blogging, learning HTML, PHP and CSS will certainly prove useful. Again, though, that’s completely optional and is no way required to start a blog.
Converts Traffic into Leads/Sales
Yet another undeniable reason why you should blog is because it helps convert traffic into leads and sales. Using a blog, you can promote your products and services to your target audience. Not every post has to be commercial in nature, but including some advertorial posts will certainly prove useful in boosting your leads and/or sales.
It’s an Extension of Your Website
Just because you launch a blog doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to neglect your primary website. In fact, you can use a blog as an extension of your primary website. It’s not uncommon for business owners to create blogs on subdomains or sub-folders of their official website. Because blogs place an emphasis on timely articles and personal connections, they enhance the brand’s own website.
What reasons drive you to blog? Let us know in the comments section below!
Image attribution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dimnikolov/
I wasn’t sold on the idea of blogging initially, but did it anyhow for SEO purposes. However, I really think that our blog has helped strengthen our relationships with our customers and position us as a subject matter expert.
I definitely think blogging helps build and/or strengthen relationships. I also enjoy writing and posting what I think others will find valuable.
Blogging surely is a great way to become known as a subject matter expert as Marty suggested. The key is to ensuring your posts are well thought out and provide content that is useful to readers. It also helps to ensure your posts are interesting.