The Blogosphere is here and it is not going anywhere. It’s not just for people talking about what their 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 – Investing Time
I have no advertising budget. I do, however, have a background in writing, so I invest a lot of time in blogging. My tag line is Travel Shop Light The World, so my blog is broken up into those three subject areas: Travel articles are specific to Nicaragua and include Top Ten Things to Do In Granada or Nicaragua Named as One of 2016's Top Travel Destinations. I use the shopping blogs to educate readers on Fair Trade and Ethical Fashion with blogs like What Is Fair Trade Fashion and Why Is It Important and Five Tips to Shop Ethically. Light The World is an all encompassing name for people, educators, nonprofits and businesses who are working to make a positive change in the world. I have a weekly blog Change Makers Spotlight that highlights these people and individuals. I push the blogs out to all my social media outlets and have gotten the vast majority of the traffic to my website from these blogs.
Thanks to Jennifer Simonson, Esperanza Market
#2 – Be an Authority
Use your blog to make yourself an authority in your niche. Don't try to be an expert on everything, make your blog personal by sharing what you know with your audience and customers. I am a small timer in the cabinet hardware business (but growing) and it's very important for me to establish myself as someone with quality product and knowledge if I'm going to make sales over Lowe's or Home Depot. I do this by showing off my products and my knowledge of these products consistently on my blog. I publish how to articles and in depth guides on everything hardware related and at the same time keep the blog interesting by showing off our hardware in beautiful kitchens and bathrooms to highlight it's obvious quality.
Thanks to Dave Lawless, D. Lawless Hardware
#3 – Free Information
I often find that the best way to attract people to your business is by giving them FREE information to topics they may be researching anyway. For instance, the blog I wrote on one of many creative ways to sell your house fast had the most impressions out of all my blog posts. Why? Because I gave free information on a very popular search term sell your house fast. I cover a wide variety of topics from how to sell your house in a divorce to how to stop foreclosure. I am no financial expert, but I give people my real estate expert advice on how I can help them stop foreclosure, or get rid of a trouble house, and if not me at the very least I give them resources to get educated. Content is King, and I have proven this to myself over and over again when I see that my site has the best ranks on blog posts I write. I hope you'll find this information useful. If anything not only to help me, but to help others who might be looking for ways to boost their business. This is the blog post that has been the most successful Sell your house fast.
Thanks to Mariana Lima, Mariana Buys Houses
#4 – An Educational Tool
I have been blogging for over a year. Initially when I started out I wrote blogs to share my thoughts across my particular industry. (I work in the recruitment industry) My aim was to not propagate the recruitment industry but to think and challenge the norm. 12 months on, I still keep that perspective however I now realise that blogging is a very useful education tool to help potential customers find you and your products on line. For me personally, it's about moving a potential customer through the sales process, especially in the Australian recruitment market where cold calling is often frowned upon! I still see blogging as one of my five pillars to business development (cold calling, referrals etc being some others). To date I have been humbled to receive a few accolades and recently I was asked to write for Undercover Recruiter and Recruiter magazine. In summary, I see blogging as a very useful platform for raising your profile through thought leadership and a very important pillar of business development.
Thanks to Mark Pearce
#5 – Bringing in Traffic
Over at Deskbright, we develop online courses on Microsoft Excel and other business skills designed to help people thrive at work. We needed a way to market these courses, so we started up a regularly-updated blog on the topics we cover — including a number of in-depth articles on Excel's more advanced features and functions. After we started the blog, we began to get a significant amount of incoming traffic from people who had found our articles on Google and other search engines. Now, we regularly update our blog with additional tutorials and tips, and it has become the primary traffic and revenue driver of our website. When users land on our blog pages, we ask for their e-mail addresses, then send them information on our course offerings as well as a newsletter that keeps them up-to-date on our latest posts. The blog has become an incredibly effective sales tool, and it's what keeps users coming back to our website again and again.
Thanks to Sam McIntire, Deskbright
#6 – Communicating with Future Clients
First of all we inform our clients about new features and updates in our WordPress plugins and themes. This is mostly done with a short explainer video that will help them to take immediate action and use the new feature. This allows us to communicate with our customers and make them feel good about using tools that are constantly updated and improved upon. The second purpose is to teach. This helps us attract new visitors that are interested in building an online business. Once a week, we publish an article about creating landing pages, building a mailing list or designing a conversion focused website. These articles are interesting to anybody looking to learn about these topics. A solid list building strategy allows us to transform a fair amount of those visitors into leads. But most importantly, we do not sell on our blog. The mix of showing the features of our plugins and themes and teaching about the topic does the selling for us. If a visitor wants to check out our tools he can do it at his own rhythm and pace.
Thanks to Shane Melaugh, Thrive Themes
#7 – A Source of Information
We use our blog as a source of information. Being in the digital marketing industry, we understand how important it is to educate users and potential clients on each component of digital marketing. Small business owners and other webmasters desire to increase their knowledge in how search marketing and more can help their business. We are going to be their resource as well as meet any of their online marketing needs. The important thing is having content they want to interact with. Delivering valuable content in the form of infographics, video content and other media offers different methods for the user to take in the information. A valuable tools for your business this year can be quiz or survery. This offers interactive content for the user that can provide useful information for your business. To either help create new content or gain feedback on your business.”
Thanks to Mark Baldwin, Baldwin Digital
#8 – Extend the Voice of a Company
Our blog has become the extended voice of our company. It allows us to tell the complete story of our events that otherwise is difficult to achieve on other social media platforms. Most importantly, it provides our prospective clients and followers with insight into our client experience. Our posts are scheduled based on days and times we know our social media followers are most active. Furthermore, we’ve adopted blitz campaigns and weekly social media focuses across our accounts to help drive interest and traffic to our blog and website. By doing so, we see double digit increases to site traffic on days we post to the blog and in the days that follow, lower bounce rates, and a more engaged audience. A more engaged audience results in more interest in our services, and ultimately more bookings.
Thanks to William Parkinson, William Parkinson Events
#9 – Building Brand Prestige
Our blog is used for two primary purposes. One: build brand prestige and awareness, and two: increase client interaction. Since we intimately serve our niche verticals such as oil & gas, and mining, we're in a unique position to provide actual breaking news. With that, we provide legitimate news content, then leverage our media connections to have our articles circulated through major publications within our industries. By having our stories [and our company name] published on respected news sources, it keeps our name relevant, and elevates our prestige. On the other hand, by first broadcasting our exclusive content on our blog, we thereby keep our current customers engaged and more frequently interacting with our company's website. We have seen a direct correlation between increased client retention and our ‘client interaction' campaigns.
Thanks to Vincent Scatena, Industrial Motor Power Corporation
#10 – Promoting New Items
We use our blog to promote our new inventory items. We are a used machinery dealer and we are always getting new pieces of equipment in for sale. The blog is the most powerful way to optimize the ever changing inventory for the search engines. The products are listed on our site, but having the information in the blog helps relate to customers that our inventory is dynamic and always changing. This encourages them to check back often because they don't know what items will be available next. In addition to posting what we have for sale we also post what are customers are looking for at the current time. This really emphasizes to our customers that we have a real relationship. We can offer equipment to them, but they can also offer equipment to us!
Thanks to David Pietig, Arlington Plastics Machinery, Inc.
#11 – Cost Effective Growth
As a business leader I am always challenged to grow my business in a cost effective way. I have found blogging to be one of the most powerful tools around to build the Zenfolio brand and traffic. Why is blogging so important for our business? First, a blog is a great way to show your customers and prospects how the business is progressing, what we are working on and who we are. Our blog is a place to connect with our audience by sharing relevant content and best practices. It is an opportunity to create a link with our customers and develop our company unique voice. Secondly, our blog generates free traffic. Blog posts are great SEO material and, if you use the right keywords, it helps boost our search rankings for our target audience. This is why we are offering a fully integrated blog tool part of the Zenfolio platform so every photographer on Zenfolio can leverage it to grow their business. Done well (with relevant and engaging content, and the right keywords) a blog is a very cost effective way to generate free traffic for years.
Thanks to Arnaud Collin, Zenfolio
#12 – Educating Customers
At Purchase Green Artificial Grass we believe educating our customers is the surest way to transform leads into sales. Everyone wants to save money and do things in a safe and sustainable way. Our blog is the perfect outlet for us to address customer questions and even objections. I regularly meet with store managers to better understand the information customers are asking about and the reasons they offer as to why they're not ready to make a purchase. From how much water artificial grass saves to the finer points of the manufacturing process, our blog is something customers can use to learn about our products and a tool for store managers to help convert leads into sales.
Thanks to Chad Vander Veen, Purchase Green Artificial Grass
#13 – A Local Newspaper
We treat our blog like a local newspaper and we are the editors and publishers. We have content creators, local writers and ourselves contribute content. We are more focused on providing content specific to our industry – real estate. Like How To Buy, How to Sell, Market Updates – and we even do much of that via video. We repurpose much of that content to our business Facebook page, and community Facebook pages we've created. Plus we share the content via an email newsletter and direct mail newsletter. But the content always starts off on the blog.
Thanks to Darin Persinger, Persinger Group
#14 – Brand Highlight
We use our blog to set our brand apart from in the marketplace. Organizational change, emotional intelligence, employee engagement is already represented in various branded versions. It is easy to assume that yet another executive or career programs is just one more drop in an ocean of training programs. We simultaneously publish blog posts to LinkedIn and share them to appropriate LinkedIn groups. Employing this strategy ensures and additional focus on our target audience and has resulted in more website activity, as well as Facebook and Twitter Followers.
Thanks to Linda F. Williams, Whose Apple Empowerment Center
#15 – Building a Global Presence
My blog was the first step I took to build the online global presence of my company. It is my way of showing our expertise in the field of Tarot Reading. As our products are visual in nature, I frequently give a glimpse of the product on my blog. Communication style is also a key differentiator in our business and is showcased through the blog. It tells me that kind of content people like to read and I can use that to build more services and products.
Thanks to Shweta Kapoor, Tarot Fortune
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