For businesses large and small, there are numerous benefits that come from maintaining a blog. Some of them, like lead generation and product/service marketing, are obvious; others are more intangible and harder to quantify but are no less important. Blogs are marketing channels (much like social media or email) that increase the visibility of a business or organization, both in search engine results and through third-party links to the content. Those third-party links, in turn, grant your business a degree of credibility or authority; when others cite your blogs in their own, you invariably come to be looked upon as an authority in your field.
In the same vein, blogs can be a tool that provides real value to readers by helping them solve basic problems or grasp the complexities of larger issues. Those readers are more likely to become customers of and advocates for your business or organization because, from their perspective, you offered them something valuable without demanding payment. To better understand these benefits and the interplay between them, let’s look at them with a bit of a finer lens.
Increased Visibility
For most business owners, the increased visibility of their website is the most immediately understandable reason to maintain a blog. For example, websites with a blog component have 434% more indexed pages than those without one. That means that search engines “see” about four-and-a-half times more content from those websites and, by extension, are likely to include them in more results across a broader range of relevant keyword searches. In other words, just having and maintaining a blog can push your website farther toward the top of more searches—and that equates to more clicks.
Blogs are also a great way to generate inbound links to your website—instances where someone else on another site provides their readers/users a link to your content. In fact, websites with a blog component are hyperlinked on other pages about 97% more frequently than those without one. These inbound links have the potential to drastically increase your volume of qualified leads since users will often be coming to you from a site that covers some sort of related information—inserting a call-to-action at the end of the blog almost guarantees at least will convert into meaningful leads.
More to the point, inbound links help to further generate credibility for your organization. When others link to your content, especially as a source of information, it tacitly indicates that you’re an authority on the subject at hand. The more well-researched and well-written your blogs are, the more likely it becomes that people will link to your content with greater frequency. Your company (or someone who represents it) may even be tapped to contribute guest articles to an existing, established industry blog. In all cases, the price tag for that kind of social/word-of-mouth advertising is nothing but a few hundred words once or twice a month.
Added Value
Everyone loves a value proposition, and blogs are an easy way to integrate them into your business model. Handing out a few morsels of expertise for free is an easy way to demonstrate to customers (both current and prospective) that you “know your stuff” and help them solve or discover some issues with their own businesses. By giving away some small pieces of knowledge or expert insights, you build a reputation among customers for prioritizing their best interests over your own bottom line.
That reputation, in turn, inspires loyalty and advocacy in your customers; not only will they fervently ignore your competitors, but your clients will also help you build your business through the kind of word-of-mouth advertising that money alone can’t buy. Whatever price you pay in time or resources will almost certainly be repaid to you through the status your business will gain.
This strategy is essentially the modern version of giving clients the first piece of a puzzle or the first in a series of lessons for free. Salespeople have used this strategy to great effect for hundreds of years—think of every piece of software that comes with a free trial or every gym that offers the first session of training for free—and the ubiquity of internet access makes it a more sensible, easily executed tactic than ever before. The principle is easy to see in action. For example, websites with blogs see almost 55% more traffic than those without, and they generate about 67% more leads. While some portion of that bump might be attributable to the greater number of indexed pages alone, it would be foolhardy to assume that those drastic increases aren’t at least partially due to the content and quality of your blog.
IDMI.Net’s Professional Writing Services
While the benefits of maintaining a blog should certainly be clear, the reality is that not every organization can afford to devote working time or resources to a time-consuming endeavor like blogging. And some organizations that can handle blogging and marketing tasks in-house just prefer to enlist the services of professionals because they have more faith in the final product. No matter the reasons why, if you want or need professional writing services IDMI.Net is here to answer the call.
Our writers can create blogs for your organization from the ground up, while our talented designers will match an appealing stock image to the text to make the post and any related thumbnails visually interesting. Blog topics are dictated by the customer, although our team will gladly provide a list of vetted, industry-specific topics at a client’s request. Whether you want to highlight specific products/services, discuss emerging or hot topics in your industry, relay advice to your core audience, or just enhance your SEO rankings with more indexed pages, we can help.
Our monthly blogging package includes an article (up to 500 words) accompanied by a single stock image, with a minimum three-month commitment. Additional blog entries and images are available for an additional fee. We can also turn the blog entries we create into social media-friendly posts so that organizations with large and/or dedicated followings can prompt their audience to engage with their messaging through those avenues, too. When you need content and the means to get it out there, IDMI.Net makes it happen.
Final Thoughts
Blogging is an invaluable advertising/marketing tool for businesses of all sizes and in almost all industries. Though it’s regularly eclipsed by the outsized reputation and pseudo-mysticism surrounding social media marketing, overlooking the value of blogging does a severe disservice to your organization. No other tool has the power to make your business more visible, more credible, and more in-demand all at once. Why miss out on that kind of power when it’s so readily available to you? Contact IDMI.Net for a free quote and see what we can do for you.