22 Entrepreneurs Share How They Use Blogging for Business

Mercy - CBNation Team

5 years ago

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 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- Share news and fresh content

OptimumHQ updates our blog at least once per week with fresh content that resonates with our customers and web visitors; we blog on a variety of business topics and current events. Additionally, we share industry news, press releases related to the business such as new awards, feature releases, and new hires; plus, white papers and case studies showcasing our customers’ success. A blog should be multi-faceted and have something for everyone to enjoy. We also share all of our blog content across our social media channels and in our quarterly newsletter.

Thanks to Amanda Nielsen, OptimumHQ!

#2- Two objectives

We use our business blog primarily for two objectives. The first is to establish ourselves as a knowledgeable source for small business news. We want potential and current clients to learn from our blog, and educating them can start building that relationship before we even speak with them. Second, we use it to drive traffic. Business owners might not know about our product until they stumble upon one of our informative articles by chance. From there they can explore the rest of our website and see if our services are something they could use. We do other more aggressive forms of marketing, but a blog is an excellent way to passively funnel business to your site.

Thanks to Alex Shvarts, FundKite!

#3- Improve SEO

We use our blog mainly for link-building and outreach opportunities that will improve the SEO of our site, rather than for call to actions and transactional content. Our team of content writers create high-quality copy on our niche and then attempt to build links with other high authority sites, promoting our content with the aim of getting a backlink. The resulting increase in our DA has helped to really boost our presence in search results.

Thanks to Stephen Hart, Cardswitcher!

#4- Many purposes

Our business blog serves many purposes. It’s a device that allows us to express the personality of our brand to our current and potential, speaking directly to them in a chatty manner on any number of topics, establishing a greater connection with them. It’s an SEO tool allowing us to continually deliver fresh, keyword-optimized content to boost our search engine rankings. And it’s a means of practically demonstrating our expertise in our industry, responding to the many queries and concerns that leads have, regardless of where they are in the conversion funnel. Our blog is carefully planned to include content that appeals to every group we are targeting, and stands as a clear example of our dedication to our work and our desire to provide help for these varying groups.

Thanks to Kraig Martin, Storage Vault!

#5- Drive interest

My blog drives interest in my books, speaking, and career coaching – the three lanes that comprise my business. Since I’m in essence, the product, I invite readers to see the person first: me as CHRO, author, speaker, husband and dad. Then, through my blog and videos, I provide samples of what is written in the books and said from the stage. This allows people to effectively try before they buy. It also gives them a peak at what a traditional approach keeps concealed. The knowledgable HR guy can be funny. The introverted author can rock the stage. The career coach's insights are real and relatable. While career management is often the jumping off point, I write for, speak to, and work with the whole of people. The blog showcases that level of transparency.

Thanks to Lazhar Ichir, Topicseed!

#6-Two purposes

We use our blog to answer questions prospective customers may have and to help generate links to our blog through link building tactics. These two combined improves our search rankings overall. Our blog posts get seen by more relevant people who begin to trust us because we were able to answer their question and eliminate objections. Thus, this drives targeted traffic to our site and increase our conversions.

Thanks to Rodney Yo, Best Online Traffic School!

#7- Expert round-ups

Here at YourParkingSpace, we love to organize experts roundups on our blog. We try to come up with a roundup idea, and reach out to influencers in our industry. We ask them to send a quote that we can include in the roundup. It's a great strategy for several reasons: -You get free content for your blog, which is great to confer more authority to your website and improve your SEO -It helps you establish new relationships with business owners and influencers in your industry -You can ask roundup participants to share the roundup on their website. A great way to spread the word about your business and acquire new mentions online and backlinks to your website.

Thanks to Gregory Golinski, YourParkingSpace!

#8- Our blog is our primary business

We made over $10,000 per month from our blog and reach over 300,000 readers. From ads alone, we make $34-$4k each month. We also do heavy affiliate marketing and sponsorships. We have been doing this for 2 1/2 years now and are just starting to develop and launch our own products to sell. A blog is an incredible marketing tool to capture leads and make sales.

Thanks to Kelan & Brittany Kline, The Savvy Couple!

#9- Marketing platform

I use my blog as a marketing platform just like social media. I love to share a blog post of a wedding or session before that session or wedding gallery is delivered. I share and make sure my couple or family knows it is there and often times that results in shares through social media and just sending to family and friends of my blog post. This helps showcase my best work from that session or wedding and helps my blog get traffic through my clients. It not only helps with traffic to my site but an easy way to referral business.

Thanks to Hilary Hull, Hilary Hull Photography!

#10- Reach a larger audience

I use my blog to reach a greater audience, and to establish a stronger connection to those visitors and readers. Blogs are great for getting visitors through search engines and social networks. I can write articles about topics that interest my target audience, and that allows me to reach a much larger audience than I would be able to reach without the blog. A blog also makes it possible for you or your business to connect with readers and increase their level of trust and loyalty. One of the ways I do this is by converting blog visitors into email subscribers. I can continue to connect and communicate with those who subscribe, and an active email list can be a very valuable asset for a business.

Thanks to Marc Andre, Vital Dollar!

#11- Establish trust and credibility

Our company blog is used to communicate directly with our consumers needs, usually in the awareness stage (meaning they just realized they have an issue of sorts that they need help with and are not yet aware of our products or services) of a sales funnel. We actively listen to our clients pain points that they’re expressing and their reasons why they use our services to then be able to better connect with others that may be experiencing the same issues. This process establishes trust and credibility which is critical for service based businesses like ours. For a lot of people, our company blog serves as the first touch point they have with our brand and by providing them with transparent answers that they may not get elsewhere helps establish our authority, which we then nurture the relationship further along using lead magnets and multi-channel retargeting PPC Ads. Our company blog is critical to attracting new leads through SEO organic traffic, which we wouldn’t be able to do without.

Thanks to JD Parkman, Marketing Media Wizard!

#12- Lead flow

As a specialty marketing agency that works with commercial contractors who do business with commercial real estate managers, we created a property management blog. All of the content is relevant to our customers end user, the property manager. The site has functions that allow commercial contractors to register for the site and property managers to find new contractors. This has created a lead flow to both our business and our existing clients. The lead flow to our business has been particularly strong, typically generating at least 30 leads per month through a detailed 11 field contact form.

Thanks to Aaron Hockel, AltaVista Strategic Partners!

#13- Exposure

We normally write in our blog a few times per month. We used to just dish out content to have more content. Stopped that, as no one cared about what we were writing about. We now use our blog for important issues in our business that relates to our customers. This can be things such as new gemstone finds, dropping prices in gold and/or platinum, or anything else we feel there is value in sharing with our customers. And then we don't leave it in our blog, we also share it on social media and include it in our email campaigns to customers. This way it gets maximum exposure to our target audience.

Thanks to Jeff Moriarty, Tanzanite Jewelry!

#14- Express more about me and my work

As a content consultant and copywriter, it's essential for me to show clients that I write well and frequently, on a wide variety of topics, and that I know the difference between blogging, journalism, and other long-form content. It's also a great way to maintain a solid organic search ranking, by making frequent updates to my site. I write about several different subjects on my blog, a lot of them culture-oriented, but I try to make sure that every post expresses a little something about me as a person, and not just a businessperson. I want readers and potential clients to feel like they're getting to know me through my work.

Thanks to Robin Catalano, Robin Catalano Digital & Content Marketing!

#15- Post business and general interest articles

I have always placed a great importance on having a company blog. It allows us to attract new potential customers by posting articles that are business as well as general interest oriented. Topics can be anything from the Royal Family to business advice. People find these articles online and click through to our website so with our blog we manage to get a lot of people on the website that never heard of us before. In our blog posts we always highlight a few of our products so even though the topic might be general interest people are still exposed to our products and some end up
converting. In short: Don't underestimate the power of a good company blog.

Thanks to William Forshaw, Maxwell-Scott!

#16- Information catalyst

I own a small law firm that relies heavily on digital marketing. My blog is my so-called stepping stone to social media. For example we recently wrote about a young woman with MS that turned to drugs to help with her symptoms. Because of the drugs she got cut off disability, which turned out to be the basis for a lawsuit. We wrote the piece, then through hootsuite we spread the piece to our social media accounts ( Google +, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin). We use it more as a informational catalyst to get to bigger platforms. Consistency is the key. Never stop blogging.

Thanks to Matt Lalande, Lalande Personal Injury Lawyers!

#17- Execute blog strategy

We consider blogging is an important extension of our brand, helping to build both thought leadership reputation and office culture. To keep us on track, we execute a blog strategy like we would for any of our clients. This involves gaining team clarity on the goal, outlining the objectives and marketing plan, determining who on the team will execute, and monitoring metrics to course correct along the way. The key to focusing our blogging efforts is not to post every day, but to carefully consider the issues our business needs to address for specific outcomes.

Thanks to Lisa B. Tilt, Full Tilt Consulting!

#18- Lead generation and education

“Happy users are informed users” – while it may sound cliché, I believe it’s imperative that businesses keep track of client knowledge and their understanding of the product. Still, how does one get around to addressing audiences at various stages of the funnel? At Survicate, we’ve established two separate content hubs. The first, Feedback Academy, is where we educate our audience on topics such as customer experience and feedback data analysis, to name just two. Apart from its educative purposes, FA also serves as a lead generation channel. The other content source is our Knowledge Base, where we focus entirely on helping our clients take the most out of our service. Such a content segmentation not only facilitates access to relevant content, but also supports our sales efforts.

Thanks to Kamil Rejent, Survicate!

#19-Communicate, advice and update

At Wistia, we try to market ourselves like a media company, with a blog separated into five topic-oriented categories – Video Marketing, Video Production, Video for Sales, Product updates and Wistia Culture. The first three categories allow us to communicate to potential customers, providing advice that helps them create more videos; the product updates category allows us to provide details of new features for existing customers; and the Wistia culture category serves as an outlet to show the world who we are, nurturing our corporate brand. Our internal research has shown that these five topics resonate most with our customers. We make it easy for our current and prospective customers to find the insights they're looking for.

Thanks to Chris Savage, Wistia!

#20- Four purposes

Still though, blogs represent a battle-tested, low friction channel to get started with it. At Snipcart, we used our blog for four reasons: boost SEO rankings, amplify community relationships, improve brand image, and drive leads & revenues. Truth be told, our most interesting results came through organic traffic. Google has evolved tremendously since the early 00’s. It has cracked down on shady industry practices like keyword stuffing and unnatural, paid linkbuilding. It’s now rewarding quality content more than ever, adding significant ranking weight to user experience signals like click-through rates, time on page, and number of pages per sessions. So if you’re keen on taking the time to educate your customer base through high quality, no BS content, Google is going to bring both traffic and money your way.

Thanks to Francois Lanthier Nadeau, Snipcart!

#21- Inform and highlight successes

We started our company blog to give insight to not only informative industry information, but also to highlight successful PR campaigns for our clientele. The implementation of industry information allows us to present new tactics and strategies, explain contrasts between similar industry professions (i.e. Understanding the Difference: Marketing, Public Relations, and Advertising) and provide professional thoughts and opinions in an informal manner. Through these posts we're able to create a dialogue with industry professionals to better our own company and provide our own content to the web. In addition, we also highlight successful PR campaigns for our clientele, such as National Night Out: A Community Building Campaign to Promote Safety, to promote our clients via our own platforms while also maintaining consistent deliverables.

Thanks to Warren H. Cohn, HeraldPR!

#22- Create thought leadership

We’ve seen tremendous results from the robust content marketing strategy we implemented for our blog. Myself, along with a team of writers that I manage, provide well-researched and thought out blog posts that our audience finds valuable. We stay on top of trending news and try to answer questions that our readers might have. We go into great detail to provide as much information as possible. Our blog serves as a comprehensive guide to data recovery and digital forensics, and all the complex pieces that comprise it.. Aside from our blog, we create thought leadership pieces for other publications as well. Collaborating with other thought leaders in the industry is extremely beneficial. Establishing a voice in your industry is important for anyone who wants to continue to grow and expand. We try to become an authority that others trust and look up to.”

Thanks to Brian Gill, Gillware Data Recovery!