13 reasons your business needs a blog by Chris Garrett, 20 October 2009
A blog can increase your sales and profit. In his new Wordtracker Masterclass book, Blogging for Business, Chris Garrett gives a detailed guide on how to run a successful blog. Here, Chris lists 13 reasons why your business needs a blog.
1. Attract an audience
Every business needs traffic, whether this is foot traffic in a high street store or 'eyeballs' to an online store. A good blog not only generates traffic, but also helps retain that traffic, keeping people coming back and growing in loyalty.
2. Inform, interact and learn from your audience
Informed and educated visitors become confident, loyal customers. More people are turning to the internet to research before they buy. You can position your company as a go-to resource, thereby winning more business. Plus, with blogging, information flows both ways. You can gain insights into your customers' minds, their needs, challenges and preferences. Comments, feedback forms, surveys and polls become instant, spontaneous market research tools. It’s like working with a free focus group that tells you which products you should create and why.
3. Retain your audience
Too many marketers focus on gaining initial visibility through advertising or attention-seeking stunts. If that tactic does not convert into instant sales, the budget and effort are wasted. With a blog you can hold prospects' interest for longer, winning customers round over time, and bringing them back to hear from you long after their first contact. No need for spammy, desperate-sounding sales messages.
4. Energize your audience
Even better than a growing, loyal audience is a growing, loyal audience that takes action. A blog can motivate your visitors to do things. All you need is copy that warms them up, a motivating story and a clear call to action.
5. Recruit help, contacts, employees
Why spend thousands on recruitment consultants and advertising when you have the best recruitment mechanism at your fingertips? Your blog audience is the most likely to respond and the most likely to be appropriate future employees and networking contacts.
6. Respond to stories and customers
Customer service and public relations have never been more important; a bad story can spread around the web’s social networks at speed. Your blog becomes a responsive outlet to explain your side of any story and douse the fires of negative activity.
7. Links for direct traffic
You can’t beat valuable, authoritative content for attracting links from other websites, forums, discussion lists and social networks. These links bring a quantity of attention, as well as quality, targeted visitors that turn into good leads.
8. Links for SEO
As well as the direct traffic benefit of leads, links are important in bringing in search visitors. The more linkable your website, the better your search results will be. Very often traditional websites are difficult to link to and not easy for search engines to index. This can be due to the website's structure, the software it's built with, or its overly complex URLs. Blogs are almost always superior in this respect.
9. Building trust and familiarity
Trust is vital in making sales and important for encouraging visitors to opt into your lead-generation process. By starting with compelling information and resources, and by encouraging repeat communication, you build familiarity. Over time, this creates a strong bond of trust, making sales so much easier.
10. Branding
This positive attention and these value-based, long-term experiences don’t just create trust. They help to create a stronger, better brand. This leads to word-of-mouth advertising, which is one of the best forms of promotion you can get.
11. Grow a community
Through discussion, interaction and comments, you can help forge a sense of community that can be strengthened both online and off.
12. Offer better service
Your blog provides multiple routes for customers and prospects to get in touch. It can show your human, approachable side, allow better customer interaction, and improve customer service.
13. Initiate more sales
All of these benefits add up to more new and repeat sales from much happier and better informed customers.
About Chris Garrett
Chris Garrett is an internet consultant, writer, web geek and co-author of the popular ProBlogger Book. Since 1994, Chris has helped thousands of individuals, non-profits, small businesses and blue chips make the most of the web. In 2005 Chris founded OMIQ to help organizations attract, engage and retain audiences online. You can find out more, and grab two free ebooks, by visiting his blog at chrisg.com
Chris is the author of Wordtracker's new e-book, Blogging for Business.
20 comments
Can't argue with any of it Chris, nice post. I love being able to evangelize my brand with a blog. If I were representing a business, creating a blog would be one of my first actions. Most are simply too scared or lazy to do it...that means you get an edge on everyone else.
Great post Chris! Blogs are great at showing the knowledge your company has, plus it allows for easy interaction with your customers.
Chris, great post! I agree businesses need blog.. Bloging is not a hobby anymore. It is becoming a major platform for many serious business owners. I think it is one of the main elements in branding and makes it much easier for our people to make decision and give us the right feedback. Blog is the best method for a marketing research..
Thank you..
Tatyana Gann
My website is active as of last week. I have been blogging and I find it to be fun and I have interesting topics to talk about - my kids books. I have yet to receive any responses, but I hear that it takes time. I hope not too long though. Thanks, Elly Brown
Chris, your 13 points are very valid and good reasons for a business to have a blog. You might do a follow-up post, if not done already, on the benefits of blogs from an SEO standpoint (expanding item #8).
Blogs aren't quite the instant communication tool that Twitter and Facebook are, but it is one of the quickest and most effective ways to get valuable content and media to a large audience. A well optimized blog can start getting traffic almost immediately upon publish.
Chris, Great post. Just to add on, you can syndicate blog contents (blog posts) to social media, bring tons of traffic from social media to your blog. That can almost solve the issue of no traffic to site.
Keep it up
This is excellent information. Business blogs are becoming as important as a company's website.
I love writing my thoughts and experiences in my blog. It sends a message out almost immediately to anyone having the same interest and to those who are searching for the keywords interlaced into my blog posts.
Writing at least twice a week keeps the content fresh.
Thank you for writing this very informative and helpful article.
Our own blog is a useful tool for our business, but I find it is often hard work to try and keep thinking up fresh content and news to add to it - Any thoughts on how we can overcome this?
Great article. I've been blogging for over 3 years. I agree with everything you wrote.
I find we get more new guests at our boutique clothing optional resort because of our blog than we do from twitter and facebook combined.
Hi There - I know I want to Blog, but I'm torn between creating a blog with ads vs. one without. Anyone like to respond with the pros and cons?? Thx
Thanks Chris for this really good info. I had a sneaking suspicion that blogs were the best way to keep in contact with customers and are the best way to get higher rankings, and your article confirm this.
What is the ideal blog approach for B2B companies with low-involvement or commoditised offerings like stationery supplies, cleaning services, etc.?
Thank you Chris for your very interesting info. Our company has had a website for about 12 years now and we are always looking at ways of driving traffic to the site. In the last couple of years we have considered using a blog but haven't yet got around to it. Having read your 13 points, I think it's time we did. I wonder if it's best to have a separate blog or to attach it to our website with a live link?
It's a comprehensive post referring to the main advantages of blogging. I didn't take blogging a serious thing to do until early this year. When I started my blog under my domain, the website part has been kind of continuing its static non-interactive while the blog is going forward so interestingly that I've mainly focused on it.
One major benefit in my business blogging has been establishing myself as a person who knows what he's doing. People trust me more easily and leave their SEO campaigns to me very conveniently. I'm happy to go on blogging and I think it's a very effective means of promoting ones online business.
Your comment that blogs are better than websites for SEO caught my attention. When I check my broken links in Google's Webmaster Tools, the one the googlebot can't follow is the /wordpress directory. So no, the blog doesn't seem search engine friendly at all. What might I be doing wrong?
It seems that the offline world is only just waking up to the power of blogging as a marketing tool for their business. It's an opportunity for professional bloggers - traditional business owners are typically up to their ears in running their businesses that they really do not have the time to add yet another item on to their daily tasks and employees are likewise fully engaged, so.... ta da! Enter professional blogger - blogging for money can now be blogging for business money.
best.............valentina
Sims: any day now, Wordtracker are launching a book about website content. That should help. Meanwhile, my favorite tip is to enter keywords into Wordtracker's related keyword tool and scan the results for content ideas.
Cindy: ads for what? Your own services? Google or affiliate ads? Either way, build your traffic first. Then try out different ways of monetizing until you find one that makes money short term and ads to your visitors' experience and so helps you make money long term too.
Jo D: talk around your subject, eg about the companies you've supplied, characters you meet. Look at your own company's characters and stories. Are they interesting, surprising, emotional? Try and bring them to life by writing about them.
Thank you so much for the great information. Two years ago I hired a web designer who made a beautiful site for me, but I had no traffic at all. I don't think he new anything about SEO just like me at that time.
I started to learn about internet and now at least I understand how it works. I'm still a beginner as there is a lot to learn.
My website is doing much better now and I have a blog running since Oct. I'm still working on it.
thank you a lot again
Edit
Chris, This is great,useful information. I have learned a few more reasons why I should have a blog,and I will employ them in the near future. Thanks much!