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- Demonstrate my subject matter expertise
As a solo entrepreneur – I'm a fundraising consultant – being able to write freely about a variety of fundraising topics demonstrates to prospective clients that I understand their needs and have the skills and knowledge to help them achieve their fundraising goals. In short, my blog is a key business development tool for my business.
Thanks to Stephanie Schwartz, Little Bean Group!
#2-For various reasons
First of all, it has to be to improve our Google Search ranking. Organic traffic is a channel every business wants to capture because once you built the foundation, it requires very little budget to maintain. It also has a high conversion rate which leads us to our next reason – to drive sales. Organic traffic results have a significantly more trust value compared to paid social media ads and paid search engine ads. Once you got that top spot on Google, customers will trust your company and your product.
Thanks to Luat Duong, Scandinavian Biolabs!
#3- Brand awareness and sales
We publish evergreen content relative to jewelry that keeps bringing to us a huge amount of people looking for answers about jewelry (gold purity, jewelry care…), this is a way for us to be seen by those people while there were not aware of our existence. These evergreen pieces of content are also a great way to showcase our products, from our inventory. We also publish very focused blog posts on specific keywords that have a high rate of conversion. This allows us to generate highly qualified traffic for our custom-made jewelry service. All our blog posts link to products, other blog posts, and services pages leading our readers to our conversion pages.
Thanks to Nicolas Tranchant, Vivalatina Jewelry Shop!
#4- My most crucial marketing tool
Furthermore, blogging helps me build my personal and business brands. Indeed, as I publish more content in my blog, I notice that I have created closer and meaningful relationships with my readers. In short, my blog is my main tool to reach new audiences, grow my authority and reputation inside my niche, and build new and stronger relationships.
Thanks to Yker Valerio, Bon Vivant Caffe!
#5- Three ways
The Proper Wild blog has been a great resource for in-house PR, community building, and disseminating information about our product. Our blog covers topics specific to our clean energy shots, like explaining “What Is L-Theanine?”, the Organic Caffeine from Green Tea that gives our clean energy shots their power. We also publish stories about must-try pre-workout drinks, road-trip essentials, and other topics that will promote our clean energy shots to anyone coming from Google looking for a recommendation, and they’re topics we know our existing clientele will love.
Thanks to Vincent Bradley, Proper Wild!
#6- Keep our readers engaged and entertained
We strive to publish informative and educational content on employment, recruitment, and similar. We are always conducting interviews and publishing polls with data that both recruiters and workers find interesting. Our customers want in-depth information, so we talk to them, collect results, and publish it back to them. Our main goal at the moment is to stay consistent and increase the range of our research, and we are going to do exactly that in 2021 and beyond.
Thanks to Akram Assaf, Bayt.com!
#7- A place of resources for all of our users
Being in the music education industry and striving to move music education forward, we aim to give all music teachers, parents, and students various long-form resources that they can learn from, be inspired by, and spark conversations. Although we do implement SEO to help better reach our audience, our main focus is to be a place where existing and new users can find valuable information.
Thanks to Ohad Golan, Tonara!
#8- Showcase my personality and for buyers' awareness
When creating my blog, I had two things in mind: 1) It would act as an introduction to my personality and 2) it would satisfy the Awareness portion of the buyer's journey. No one wants to be sold to 24-7 but they do enjoy receiving guidance when it is needed. My blogs are created to provide insight, guidance, tools, and perspective for small business entrepreneurs – not to sell them solutions or promises. By utilizing this approach, I become an asset to those looking to grow the technical side of their business. What may have started a quick blog read turns into a subscriber, then a newsletter opt-in, followed by a social media link/follow, and eventually an inquiry to learn more about my services (or a referral to someone who may need my services). It may be a passive approach but it has been quite effective.
Thanks to LaKenya Kopf, Kopf Consulting!
#9- Driving traffic and generating leads
Our main objective to use a blog is to drive traffic back to our website. We create a knowledgeable and informative blog for our audience and that converts traffic into leads. Our marketing team uses blogs as a marketing technique to drive traffic back to our website. In the past few years blog has improved traffic to our website and increased our sales. I believe that blogs can generate leads, but it usually depends on how well you use them. It’s time-consuming for some people, but with the right approach, it can generate long-term results for businesses. We consistently created good content, and ultimately, it helped us build our website a leading authority in the industry.
Thanks to CJ Xia, Boster Biological Technology!
#10- For brand identity
I started my blog, Planner Me Up, to establish a brand identity, build trust with my audience, and drive more traffic to my shop on Etsy. Within six months of starting my blog, I’ve generated over a hundred sales for my printables and digital planners using only two essential tools – Pinterest and SEO. The organic traffic I receive from users searching Google for productivity tips and tools is priceless. Because of my blog, I’ve grown my email list exponentially with little to no effort and have acquired loyal customers who visit my blog regularly for practical strategies and tips they can use in order to boost their productivity.
Thanks to Meghan J., Plannermeup.com!
#11- Generate new website visitors
At Cardinal Digital Marketing we actively blog as part of our content marketing and search engine optimization strategy. Our blog is a great tool for generating new site visitors and expanding our reach. We blog on trending and industry-specific topics, utilizing keyword optimization. As our blog content indexes (and ranks) in the search engines, it works to generate web traffic. Additionally, as a result of the quality of our content, our blogs are frequently used as sources for other blogs. This helps generate referral web traffic.
Thanks to Alex Membrillo, Cardinal Digital Marketing Agency!
#12- Two key ways
First is to cover time-sensitive topics. These blog posts will almost always tie to either a email newsletter or social media post that we're coordinating at the same time. The content is mostly repurposed across different mediums so it's fairly low effort. Also, there's a SEO benefit too…since search engines tend to prefer sites that are regularly updated. These timely blog posts are a way to remind the search engines that our site has new content and not to penalize it for being stale (because let's face it…mortgage isn't the most fast-paced industry). The next use for our blog is to hit topics that aren't specifically mortgage-related. Either something more relevant to our team on a personal level OR topics that are tangentially related to mortgage and/or homeownership like: real estate, interior design, culture, SMB tips, or local info. We always select topics that we think our audience will relate to…and that has both SEO PLUS overall engagement benefits across all our channels.
Thanks to Julie Aragon, Julie Aragon Lending Team!
#13- Lead qualification
While thought leadership and brand positioning are essential, using your blog to establish what you do, how you do it and to provide a broad ballpark on pricing is critical for professionals and higher-end service providers. Time is every entrepreneur and CEOs most treasured resource. If you can use our blog to filter out potential clients who aren’t a good fit, you can focus on those who are. The result is a tremendous savings of time and energy that also accomplishes your secondary goal of establishing your brand.
Thanks to Trish Stukbauer, IE Marketing, LLC!
#14- Connect to our audience
Given the existing physical distance that surrounds all of us, blogs are one of the digital ways to establish your connection with your customers. We try to craft blogs that are informative in nature and can serve the needs of our audience. We try to design catchy and interesting content that can retain the attention of our readers. Attractive content is the game changer when it comes to enhancing your engagement with your audience.
Thanks to Anupama Singh, VitSupp.com!