Considering you built your website with WordPress, it might seem a bit strange to some that it doesn’t feature a blog. However, when you’re working hard on and in your business, it can feel like the last thing you can justify spending time on is blogging.
This makes sense. You’re a freelancer or business owner, designing and developing your way to success. Your website is finished. It looks great, has excellent sales copy, and offers a positive user experience. Your visitors can easily see what you have to offer and view glowing testimonials from previous clients and customers to back up those claims. Yet somehow, you’re still not getting enough business coming your way.
This could be because there’s one thing you’ve overlooked on your website: adding a blog. So why should your business website have a blog?
In this article, I will try to convince you why your business website needs a blog and then finish off with a few pointers on how to get started. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to make an informed decision as to whether blogging can help your business or not and if content marketing is a valuable use of your time and resources.
So, let’s start out with a quick overview of content marketing and how it can help your business grow.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is a marketing strategy that is based on creating and sharing content of value with your community or target audience, thus establishing yourself as an authority in your field. It helps build a strong relationship with your readers and potential customers and ultimately leads to increased sales without the need for traditional hard selling.
One very popular form of content marketing it to post great content to your blog on a regular basis. Instead of traditional outbound marketing, such as advertising and cold calling, where you go to your audience, the goal of inbound marketing, or content marketing, is to have your audience come to you.
If you’re averse to selling yourself and self-promotion, then this should sound like a form of marketing that is right up your alley. However, if you’re still not entirely convinced or you want to know more, let’s break it down further with the top reasons why your website needs a blog.
Top Reasons Why Your Website Needs a Blog
So now that we’re all on the same page when it comes to the topic of content marketing, let’s take a look at some concrete reasons why you should add a blog to your website and start publishing content on a regular basis.
You could even use these reasons to persuade your web design clients why they need a blog as part of their website package, making it another additional value-added service you can add to your portfolio.
Reason #1: More Opportunities to Be Found
A typical business website may only consist of 5-10 pages, including those essential pages you might’ve forgotten. While that could be enough to sell your proposition, it might not be enough to get your potential clients and customers to your website in the first place. That is where a blog comes in.
You see, each post you publish on your blog is another page of your website that is indexed in the search engines. This means it’s another chance for your website to be found by people searching the web. If you’re employing the core tactics of content marketing and using your blog to answer the questions and queries of your target audience, then when they turn to Google in search of a solution to their quandary, with a bit of luck and some good old-fashioned SEO, your blog posts may well be displayed in the results pages. This then brings more targeted traffic to your website.
Reason #2: Opens up the World of Social Media Marketing
Your ideal customers and clients are probably already hanging out on social media; therefore, you should be there too so that they can find you. As well as sharing content you’ve discovered that your audience will find useful and responding to any queries related to your industry that you come across, sharing your own content is something you should be doing on social media to get more visitors to your website.
However, if your site only has a few pages, all of which are focused on selling your business, then there’s only so many times you can share that content before it starts getting old.
But, with a busy blog, which regularly publishes useful content that answer questions, solves problems, and gives great value, you’ve suddenly got something to share on social media. Each tweet of a blog post is an action that has the potential to grow the number of leads heading to your site.
Not only do you now have something of your own to share on social media, but the visitors that reach your site also have something to share of yours if they wish. By using a versatile social sharing plugin like Monarch, no matter what social network your content or niche is best suited to, you can make it as easy as possible for your visitors to promote your content to their followers.
If you do take our advice and start a blog, be sure to read our guide covering how bloggers can leverage social media to get more targeted traffic to their content.
Reason #3: More Time to Connect with Your Targets
While your website’s essential pages might be perfectly crafted, sometimes a visitor just wants more before they are ready to become a client, customer, or subscriber. Maybe they want to be sure you know your stuff, want more answers to their questions, want to get to know you better, or even be sure that you are still in business.
A regularly updated blog can help with all of this. Well placed links in the sidebar, header, or footer to your blog or its best articles can make it easy for your visitors to extend their stay on your site. This can then help them to get a better sense of who you are and what you have to offer.
The home, about, services, and other core pages of your website should be concise and to the point. Your blog, on the other hand, offers more creative license and gives you the freedom to express your values, views, and personality with your target audience.
With a blog, you now have a chance to win over those visitors that aren’t sold on your sales page alone. Furthermore, by also taking advantage of email marketing and using a plugin like Bloom, you can give yourself another chance to connect with those visitors who still aren’t ready to pull the trigger but also aren’t quite ready to walk away for good.