One of the lessons that we discuss at length in our SEO classes is that blogging is so critical for all businesses. I had one of my students tell me last year:
“I don’t see anyone in my industry blogging, so I shouldn’t blog either, right?”
Wow. WRONG. I told him that if no one in his industry is blogging, that this is actually a HUGE opportunity for him to get way ahead of his competition! By the time his competitors figure it out, he’ll be so far down the road that they won’t be able to catch him.
Seize the opportunity now.
Why Blogging Is Vitally Important to Business
Even if your competitors are already blogging, why should you as a business owner consider blogging? There are probably too many reasons to list in a reasonable amount of space, so I’ll focus on three primary reasons.
Engage Online With Customers
Your readers are likely the ones who will become customers and buy from you. I always tell my students and people when I give talks:
“People buy into you before they buy from you.”
In other words, if you haven’t done a good job building trust and authority in your industry, people won’t buy from you, no matter how great your offer is. If you demonstrate through your blog articles that you’re an authority in your particular industry, you’ll prove that you know what you’re talking about.
Furthermore, your readers can respond to your articles by posting responses, asking questions, or otherwise engaging with you online. The more you have these types of online conversations and respond to people’s questions, the more others will get involved in your content.
If you only write an article once per month, people won’t be as engaged. If you produce an article every other day, your readers will eagerly await your next post to find out what other cool stuff you’re going to tell them.
At some point, when they are ready to buy, they’ll engage with you to find out how you can help solve their particular problem (by buying your stuff).
Link Building
We’re all told that we have to have links to our website. I will be writing a series of articles on the correct way to build links. Suffice it to say for now, that blogs are a fantastic source of links. First, you can sculpt your links back to your own website with keyword-rich links and target specific key phrases (see the link at the top of this article?). That’s one great example of how you can build some links.
But blogging goes even further than that. The more you write great content about your particular field of expertise, the more people will read your articles. Guess what? When you write great articles, readers will reference your articles in their posts and link back to it. So great blog content generates great incoming links – or what I call link bait. You post great articles, it attracts links like fish to a baited hook. This is the best way to generate links, bar none. There’s no easy road, it just takes writing good articles.
Quality Content
Your readers love great content, and so do the search engines. The more content you produce, the more the search engines will come back for more. The more frequently you product GOOD content, the more the search engines will learn that they can keep coming back for more content to index. Freshness counts here, and if your content smells a little stale, the search engines won’t come back so soon.
As you build a library of information through great articles, the more Google is going to serve your website up as a good reference for search terms people want to find out about. If you don’t create much content, your competitors will overtake you. But if you generate fresh content every few days, over time, you’ll continue to bubble up to the top of Google without even trying.
There are so many other reasons why blogging is important to your business, but I’ll leave it at these top three for now.
What other benefits have you seen for your own business? Tell us in the comments.
About Thomas Petty
Articles like this are an exmpale of quick, helpful answers.
I was really confused, and this answered all my quesotins.