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 has 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- Share relevant and valuable information
I teach people about what I do and why it’s important to them. Blogging also provides inspiration for my audience. Overall, I use blogging to communicate my thoughts to my audience as well as the actions they should take in order to achieve their goals and live their dream lives.
Thanks to Cassandra Freeman, Thoughtful Inspirations!
#2- Help clients understand the legal process
Specifically, we blog to help our clients understand the legal process because in all honesty, legal jargon can be incredibly confusing. Blogging about that jargon helps the client understand what is going on with their case in a general sense. Not only that, but we also routinely update our current litigation pages and blogs to reflect majors wins of a case. It saves us time by not having to call or email each and every client, and it saves the client time by not having to consistently check in with us – all of the updates can be found on our pages. Blogging can be incredibly beneficial to a company, especially a small business, when used correctly. I highly recommend blogging as a entrepreneur or business owner.
Thanks to Lindsey Andrews, TorHoerman Law!
#3- Several purposes
We started blogging almost immediately upon starting our business. The blog serves several purposes for us. Primarily, it is an opportunity to share emerging trends and techniques with our community, which we do via our website, LinkedIn, and provide them at various classes. It also serves as an opportunity to educate our potential customers on additional areas where we have expertise. Additionally, I ask for input on aspects of interviewing that our community would like to see additional information and research on and then produce blogs addressing those. Finally, it is an outstanding method to establish our subject matter expertise and has earned webinar, radio show, and conference invitations.
Thanks to Mark A. Anderson, Anderson Investigative Associates!
#4- Marketing our products
Running an e-commerce company requires a team of vigilant marketing experts to maintain our SEO. As a manufacturer of health and beauty products, we regularly publish blog posts on a variety of relevant topics ranging from makeup reviews to DIY soap recipes. Similarly, incorporating structured data, focusing on relevant keywords, and increasing our publishing frequency has helped promote more click-throughs. Nevertheless, we learned that shamelessly pushing products won’t generate significant sales or conversions. Ultimately, we revised our content marketing approach and developed a non-promotional blog to rank for keywords independent from our own merchandise. Overall, our content curation methods have worked wonders for our brand recognition and general credibility. When content is curated effectively, it builds trust with its audience and can make a brand the go-to for users. Becoming an established authority in the industry has also facilitated our relationships with several social media influencers.
Thanks to Nate Masterson, Maple Holistics!
#5- Giving back and providing resources
When I started my firm Cofield Advisors – Financial Planning for Millennials I thought that blogging would be a huge waste of time. Spending hours writing articles that very few, if anyone, would read just didn't seem like a good use of time with all the other priority tasks that running a business comes with. I must say, I couldn't have been more wrong. Since starting my blog in January I have gain almost 1,000 subscribers but more than that I am actually helping people! I have received countless emails on how I have changed someone's financial life by them reading my blog posts. Everyone can't afford a financial planner but that doesn't mean that should be denied financial intelligence. So for me, it is one of my ways of giving back and providing resources for those who aren't ready to work with a financial planner full-time. On the other hand, my blog has generated business as well. I've had about 5 clients that were blog subscribers and eventually decided they wanted to come aboard and become a client. They mentioned that my blog helped demonstrate my financial intelligence and made them feel like they knew me because they had been long-term followers. I say this to urge business owners to start a blog for whatever they specialize in. You'd be surprised at how many people you can help by spending an hour a week writing.
Thanks to Cortlon Cofield, Cofield Advisors!
#6- Brand awareness
Utilising a company blog is a fantastic way to increase brand awareness, target specific users with key content and ultimately drive up sales. Google prefers long-form content so I always aim for two thousand words of content for any post. It ensures topical depth which is now a big factor after google's hummingbird update and it also means that you're very likely to pick up traffic to your website from long tail keywords. A top tip for writing long-form content is to make sure you're only targeting one keyword or phrase per post, otherwise, the separate posts compete with each other and neither article will rank in Google. This is called keyword cannibalisation. Ninety percent of the traffic to my website comes from visitors to the blog. The key is to structure the page so the user enters your site via a blog post and then your site structure moves them down the sales funnel. The blog should be used as the entry point to your site, it's a great opportunity for you to write about the key niche areas where you can demonstrate expertise and build trust with readers. It's then up to the user experience of your site to navigate users through the site to build their trust to a point where they are willing to buy.
Thanks to Liam Smith, Liam Smith Photography!
#7- Search engine optimization
In the competitive industry of SMS communication solutions, our blog plays a vital role in elevating our business on an SEO level. Intensive keyword research and indexing through blog articles have helped put our organization at the top of SERP (search engine results page) rankings. Identifying questions that our target customers are asking has driven many of our content ideas. Engaging content, particularly infographics, has been most successful. Even blog posts 3-4 years old continue to generate traffic for our website, illustrating the advantage of evergreen blog content.
Thanks to Carl Krumins, SMSGlobal!
#8- Educational purposes
We share three blogs per week and the time that we put into writing valuable and educational articles for our community help us to increase brand awareness tenfold. Our website receives over 500,000 unique visitors per month and we attribute that to well-written SEO optimised blog articles.
Thanks to Mackayla Paul, Plann!
#9- Content marketing
Our blog exemplifies all of the tactics we recommend to our clients. As a public relations and marketing agency, we perceive our blog as the heart of all of our content marketing efforts: at the intersection of our social media channels, email newsletters and SEO strategy. The blog positions our agency at the forefront of new marketing trends and grants the appropriate platform to highlight our internal subject matter experts. In addition, it offers another avenue to highlight our clients in a small-but impactful-way. The Beyond Fifteen blog establishes our brand and differentiates us as leaders in our industry.
Thanks to Lauren Ellermeyer, Beyond Fifteen Communications!
#10- A number of ways
As business owners, we love what we do and want to share as much information as possible. Particularly when our mission includes helping others, it's tempting to want every blog to be about our industry, key challenges, or product arena. What I've found to be more helpful is a mix of four themes: informational, inspirational, personal, and promotional. Blogging has been particularly helpful for me to express my personal voice. Prospects and clients have often expressed feeling as though they knew me before we ever spoke, simply because they had been reading my blogs. That personal connection gives me an advantage. Informational posts create credibility while doses of inspiration connect on an emotional level. Through this mix, I earn the right to promote my offerings, and am much more likely to garner a positive response to my calls to action.
Thanks to Charlene DeCesare, Charlene Ignites, LLC!
#11- Improve our rankings
Gaining high rankings in Google can be a severe challenge for an E-Commerce company. Limited content on product pages just doesn't rank well. We have utilized our blog to create in-depth and educational articles that have helped skyrocket our rankings, connect with customers, and provide a top of funnel content strategy to find new clients. The key is to make sure you or your team is writing the best content for the article topic. This strategy has worked out so well for us we now have a full-time editor, editorial assistant, and an entire team of freelance writers. Best content wins!
Thanks to Mikey Moran, Private Label Extensions!
Blog; https://www.privatelabelextensions.com/blog
#12- Answer common questions
The purpose of our blog is to answer common questions about financial services and provide visitors with legitimate advice that will direct them to call or contact one of our professionals. The Bottom Line: We have found that our blog content delivers significantly more ROI when compared to internet and social media advertising, as well as lead purchasing.
Thanks to Sonny OSteen, Insurancequotes2day!
#13- Drive traffic and sales
At Prep Expert, we've found that our blog helps drive a fantastic amount of inbound traffic and sales leads. It took time for us to experiment and find a format that works for us, in terms of engagement and conversions. Our general format is the following: 1) Introductory paragraph and thesis statement, 2) Infographic summing up the content itself as a visual preview, 3) Section Graphic, 4) Section Header followed by TLDR quote, 4) Written content. We've found that this format helps break up text into easily digestible chunks that also provide visual engagement. By doing so, our overall page views have increased as have our on-page conversions from the lead magnets we inserted into every post.
Thanks to Shaan Patel, Prep Expert!
#14- Two ways
Our software solves very specific pain points that many iPhone users experience, like needing to print out text messages or fixing a broken iTunes backup. We primarily use our blog to attract potential customers by providing tutorials on how to solve their problems using our software, so our tutorials show up when they search on their issue. Secondarily, we post tutorials about problems and solutions we've found in our general business area – software development, iPhones, and using iTunes – to attract citations/links to our website as an authority on iPhones and software development.
Thanks to Kelly Wilkerson, Decipher Media!