The Blogosphere is here and it is not going anywhere. It’s not just for people talking about what they’re eating for lunch or their next celebrity crush. Blogging is big business for entrepreneurs and business owners. CEO Blog Nation recently launched a blogging community and we regularly blog for entrepreneurs and business owners and there are numerous reasons to blog. Rescue a CEO asked some businesses how they use blogging to help their business.
#1 – Manufacture Luck
In addition to earning traffic, and links for search engine optimization efforts, and to gain awareness around your business having a well crafted blog related to your industry that would interest readers can also manufacture luck. Let me explain… Our company is currently in talks with a strategic investor looking to make a major capital infusion in our company, and one of the things that impressed them the most about our company was the effort that we place in our blog and positioning GreenPal as a thought leader in the lawn care industry. Put simply content marketing and a well run blog can manufacture serendipity
Thanks to Bryan Clayton, GreenPal!
#2 – Add Value to the Site
My website features free guides to help people set up any type of website using Wix. I use my blog to add value to the site by providing additional information/tutorials that will appeal to specific users. For example, through my live chat I learned that many visitors were small business owners. This inspired several posts including one on how blogging can boost a business website. Having a blog also helps me improve my SEO and is great for sharing on social media.
Thanks to Leah Leitch, Build a Site with Leah!
Blog: http://www.buildyourownblog.net/blog
#3 – Education
Being an education company focused on women's reproductive health, the main purpose of our blog is education. Our product is 100% organic pads and tampons and the real significance of that needs to be conveyed through education. Short factual articles that are packed with information and get to the point are best for us! Most people don't actually know that mainstream menstrual hygiene products have toxins like bleach, pesticides and bleach. Without a blog, it would be difficult to convey our message and mission in enough detail. The blog is an extension of our product and a way to provide value to our audience by introducing them to other likeminded avenues such as apps for women's health. We also take the opportunity to answer their burning questions about reproductive health!
Thanks to Taran Ghatrora, ElleBoxCo!
#4 – Establish Trust & Credibility
As a growing search marketing agency in Houston, we use our blog as a way to establish trust and credibility with our current customers and potential customers. Much of our content is centered around industry awards, client success stories and content that is useful and relevant for our clients about the search marketing world. Our clients rely on us as their partner to keep them updated and extract what's important to them regarding algorithm updates and search marketing trends. Our blog is a great platform to easily do that for our customers, especially when our blogging efforts are combined with email marketing. We also use our blog to display our company culture and showcase our employees with photos and spotlights for those who have been with our company for over 5 years.
Thanks to Julia Karnezis, TopSpot Internet Marketing!
Blog post: https://www.topspotims.com/blog/2017/05/is-tabbed-and-accordion-content-okay-for-seo/
#5 – Interview Small Business Owners
Lately, one of our favorite ways to use our company blog is to interview other small business owners on it for feature posts. We have been doing a series on Benefit Corporations which has been a fantastic experience. Not only does it tie in with what our business does, but it gives B Corp owners a chance to tell us their inspiring entrepreneurial stories and get some well-deserved press in the process. A win-win for everyone!
Thanks to Deborah Sweeney, MyCorporation.com!
#6 – Give High-Quality Free Information to Generate Leads
My field is law and ultimately I use my blog to sell legal goods and services. Initially, I blogged so people would find me when searching for particular keywords, i.e. search engine optimization. I now take a more people first approach and use my blog to provide high-quality information to my target audience. High-quality posts to my target audience are valued by my audience and not viewed as spam. For example, my latest piece of content is a blog post, with a corresponding video presentation with 50 slides on contracts for real estate investors that is free to download. It took a while to make but I was able to make connections with a lot of real estate investors after posting that piece of content. By providing great content for free I become more valued by my target audience and ultimately get more paying clients.
Thanks to Brian Pendergraft, Esq., The Pendergraft Firm, LLC.!
Blog Post: https://tpf.legal/real-estate-contracts-for-investors/
#7 – Grow Consumer Trust & Recruit Consumers
Our team uses blogging as a way to grow consumer trust in our brand and recruit a larger consumer base. We have collective experience and resources that help us implore our skills and industry insights and share them with the public. We want to share that with our existing and potential clients because it's helpful and useful for them. When we become a useful resource, we grow our brand credibility, and become a company that is on the forefront of the client's mind. Obviously, this is important when there is competition in the marketplace. But, it's more than that. When consumers seek your brand for advice it means that they trust you and are happy to trust your services too. Using a blog is a great way to recruit clients in the future too. This is especially true when you are able to write on topics that are related to your niche, but attract a different user base. When you cover a diverse range of topics, you speak to and relate with a whole new base of potential clients. At this point in time you are able to be there for them as an immediate resource who they will think back on later. This is a great way to grow your community through a new demographic. Blogging is a great business tool which is why is a burgeoning industry!
Thanks to Nicole Silver, TrustedPros Inc.!
#8 – Give our Company a Heartbeat
With our blog we really try to give an in-depth look at the science and people behind Colorescience. Our goal is to give our company a heartbeat, if you will, as a way to further connect with our customers. We believe it's important to feature the people and technology that has made our company so great throughout the years. We also use our blog to highlight what makes our products so unique and effective. Whether it's our Brush-On sunscreen or our Mineral Corrector Palette, we give our readers the inside scoop as to what makes our award-winning products so great.
Thanks to Jameson Slattery, Colorescience!
#9 – Gives Salespeople Super Powers
My business blog gives my salespeople super powers. It has allowed me to replicate myself in both expertise and credibility. I started blogging when I started my business. Now, I have a library of knowledge about our product and industry. This material is great for training new salespeople. In addition, I don’t have to wait for people to generate their own leads. Several hundred people a day come to our blog looking for answers, and between 1 and 3% leave their contact information looking for more information. This allows me to provide my salespeople with quality prospects on their first day.
Thanks to Grant Stanley, Bric!
#10 – Guest Posts
Historically, our content marketing and blogging efforts have been geared towards build brand awareness, helping to educate readers about the services we offer and to drive consumers down the acquisition funnel. However, attracting new readers to your small business blog is much harder than most people think. This is why we have been experiments with different strategies to help use our blog to expand our overall reach. An excellent way to attract new readers to your blog in hope to acquire leads is to allow industry relevant writers to guest post on your sites. More often than not, when a guest blogger is featured on a website, they will share the post with their audience. As a result, by simply allowing other industry relevant bloggers to guest post on your site, you can effortlessly further extend your blog's reach and increase your chances of acquiring a new lead. Conversely, you can also promote your blog by actively guest post on other industry relevant blogs. For example, as a real estate finance company that works with realtors across several states, we guest posting on our partners’ sites, which allows us to get in front of readers who are actively looking for real estate information. Given they are actively looking for real estate information, they may also be interested in learning about real estate funding. Not only does this get our business in front of a new audience, but it also helps us build valuable authority within our industry.
Thanks to Sacha Ferrandi, Source Capital Funding, Inc.!
#11 – Show Your Knowledge of Your Industry
I believe it is very, very, very important to blog for your business. As a real estate agent in Louisville, KY I often work with out of town clients that are relocating to the city. Not knowing the area I wanted to put together an elaborate post so they can know what to expect when living in Louisville KY. This is one of our most popular pages on our website. Many people find this page online when searching for more info about the city. I believe by creating evergreen content like this, it gives you a tremendous amount of opportunity to show the public your knowledge of the industry. Also, by offering your expertise it helps build trust and may also help win over new clients and customers.
Thanks to Nathan Garrett, Garretts Realty Group!
Blog Post: http://garrettsrealty.com/blog/moving-to-louisville-kentucky.html
#12 – Sharing My Knowledge
I use my blog to share my expertise with others and help them find opportunities for their business or craft. I'm a publicist, so my blog is full of DIY PR tips and ways to promote yourself or your business as well other opportunities for exposure. Sharing my knowledge can help others help themselves whether they are a client or not. I'm all about empowering other entrepreneurs.
Thanks to Niesha Kennedy, Kennedy Robinson Public Relations!
#13 – Couple of Useful Ways
There are a couple of useful ways I use my blog. First of all, I use it to educate current and potential clients. My team and I take turns writing helpful articles about public relations and marketing, explaining how it works and why it's important for businesses across all industries. It's not uncommon for me to discuss various tactics with another entrepreneur and follow up our conversation by sending them a link to our blog with more details they can reference. In addition, our blog has been a really important part of our own marketing strategy. By sharing relevant content and writing each post with search engine optimization best practices in mind, we've increased our own online presence. Most of our new clients report they found us online; our blog is a very strong contributing factor for this.
Thanks to Erika Taylor Montgomery, Three Girls Media!
Blog Post: http://www.threegirlsmedia.com/2017/05/17/brand-awareness-4-reasons-need-public-relations-now
#14 – Create a Sense of Community & Humanize Our Brand
Part of being a husband and wife small business team means each of you playing to your strengths and passions; I love to run our business blog, and I use it to create a sense of community and humanize our brand. I write our posts to talk directly to our customers, send them freebies (like free desktop downloads or last minute printable cards for Mother’s Day or Father’s Day), share insight about what we’re working on behind the scenes, and give them a peek at our life as small business owners, a husband and wife, and a mom and dad just trying to do exactly what our customers are trying to do: make it all work.
Thanks to Tiffany Barry, Moonlit13 Clothing Co.!
Blog Post: https://moonlit13.com/printable-mothers-day-cards-for-last-minute-heroes/
#15 – Grow Organic Audience, Convert & Build Relationships
At the moment, I am using my client’s blog to grow an organic audience, convert their audience into customers, build relationships with other businesses and craft their company brand. Sound Shack Studios main product, music instrumentals and beats, are marketed through the their blog by writing reviews of the artists that have inspired Sound Shack's musical creations. Within the blog posts, I include links to multiple news outlets, social platforms and e-commerce websites such as youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Soundcloud, Beatstars and Facebook that have samples of Sound Shack's portfolio and the products they have to offer.
Thanks to David Gourdine, Herxheimer LLC!
Blog Post: https://soundshackstudios.com/blog/chance-the-rapper/dance-dance-dance
#16 – 2 Ways
We leverage our blog at RankPay in a variety of ways. Here are the two most important opportunities we're able to capitalize on with our content strategy. First and foremost, it allows us to provide additional value to our customers in the form of tools, tips and case studies. As you might imagine, this can have a serious impact on brand loyalty. Second, blogging is one of the single best ways to start earning more targeted traffic. We begin by digging into the queries that our potential customers are searching in Google. Then we build an SEO optimized article about the subject. Last but not least, we promote and syndicate the article where appropriate. Soon enough, those Google users that are in the market for SEO start stumbling upon our articles in the top results. Voilà, targeted organic traffic!
Thanks to Sam Warren, RankPay!
Blog Post: https://www.rankpay.com/site-speed-everything-you-wanted-know/
#17 – Swirly Culture Derbish
I use my blog to discuss my beliefs, topics of happiness, purpose, work-life balance and passion. These topics resonate with being a millennial (which I am), my leadership style type and my personal lens on life. I get to be real about how all of my millennial values are infused into my the culture I create in the workplace. I'm the President of Vancouver Island Fitness and I believe it's important to be transparent with my beliefs and thoughts (think Richard Branson). I think this inner view of who a CEO or President is, helps potential employees or customers see if they connect with your world views and it builds trust in your brand. The more consistent my values are communicated with potential employees and potential members, the more the persona of VI Fitness is solidified as well. For me, my blog helps communicate that we are more than just a fitness company. We are a lifestyle brand that believes in inspiring people
to be their best.
Thanks to Ashley Shaw, VI Fitness!
Blog Post: http://ashleyshaw.ca/happiness-defined-finally/
#18 – 3 Reasons
We are a London based niche perfumery house and we use the blog on our website for 3 purposes: (1) to drive sales(2) to demonstrate competence, and (3) to inspire confidence. We target specific keywords and create articles around these keywords to generate traffic and sales for our products online. Equally, we intend to highlight the competence that reside in our organise to the visitors of our blog. These may be consumers but they can also be retailers that stock our products. As we are one of the very few niche perfumery houses that still has a perfumer and with the perfumer also being at the centre of our company, we believe that it highlights one of our organisation's key strengths. In turn, we believe that regular blogging and exhibiting competence in these articles establishes us as the ‘go to' authority in our field of perfumery.
Thanks to Huib, Pairfum!
#19 – Share Experiences & Stories
The blog over at Ask Yvi is the personal part of my brand and business. It's my home-base to share experiences and stories, showing my followers that no matter how perfect my life might seem in those polished images on Facebook and Instagram – I am real. Here I can be myself and share how TV influences my life, how a Hawaii trip can make you anxious rather than being relaxing or how to handle the beginning stages of entrepreneurship. But not just that, I also share how I made it through those experiences in the hope to help someone else in a similar situation. Life happens and all that matters is that we keep moving. I hope my readers see themselves in my stories and bits of advice. Maybe even learn from my experiences or have an aha moment to bring them further in life and closer to their goals and dreams.
Thanks to Yvonne Heimann, Ask Yvi!
#20 – A Few Purposes
Blogs have a few main purposes: to provide content for social media to drive traffic to your website, to establish you as a thought leader in your area of expertise, and to improve your search engine rankings. Of course, in doing this you also want to entertain and inform readers with well-written content. The internet is a noisy place, and if you can add something unique and relevant to your audience, you’ll stand out. I write blogs that answer frequently asked questions (using keywords to boost SEO), to promote events or new products and services, and to demonstrate my copywriting and storytelling knowledge as well as my writing style. I then schedule everything on social media and email. As a fairly new business owner, if I didn’t do this it would be much harder for me to get my audience’s attention. The blog is something valuable I can share and it’s something that I really enjoy doing. It’s a win-win!
Thanks to Rikki Ayers, Be Rad Media!
Blog: http://www.beradmedia.com/try-this-to-get-over-writers-block/