WHY YOU NEED BUSINESS BLOGS

written by Tina Wang

According to the Technorati report, blogs are now the third most influential digital resource for consumers making a purchase. Consumers said that blogs ranks higher than Facebook for motivating a purchase decision.

What does this mean? 

Blogs are a valuable marketing tool. 

So, maybe you have no idea why businesses should blog before, but you will know why you should use blogging as a marketing tactic in this page.

First, think about how people find your business website:

l  Search directly. This means this customer is old one and cannot help you get more traffic.

l  Pay for traffic by placing paid search ads, quite expensive. And the second you run out of money, your traffic stops coming, too.

So, the way you can drive traffic is blogging, social media, and search engines. When you consider your business website pages and how often you update those webpages, you maybe already know why you need blogging.

1.      Every time you write a blog post, it's one more indexed page on your website. It's also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you've published that they should surface.

2.      Every new indexed page is one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines, and drive traffic to your website through organic search. We'll get into more of the benefits of blogging on your SEO a bit later.

3.      Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you're creating content that people can share on social networks: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, WeChat, and Google+, which helps expose your business to a new audience that doesn't know you yet.

Here is the first reason why you need blog. It helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that. What’s more, you have already have the chance to convert that traffic into leads. Just like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads. And the way this works is really simple: Just add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post.

As we can see from the figure, the best business blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have. If you're consistently creating content that's helpful for your target customer, it'll help establish you as an authority in their eyes. This is a particularly handy tool for Sales and Service professionals. "Establishing authority" is a fluffy metric -- certainly not as concrete as traffic and leads, but it's pretty powerful stuff.

Furthermore: remember what blogs does: largely through search engines!

There are other reasons businesses might want to blog but I think these are some core benefits. Are you already well underway when it comes to business blogging now? By the way, I will talk about how SEO helps blogs in my blogger later and any comments and discussion is welcomed!