Blogging: How Your Company Can Benefit

[By Sarah Faglio]

Many companies do not realize the benefits that blogging could have on their online marketing campaigns.  It has the potential to have a significant impact on a company's popularity and subsequently its discovery of potential customers.  Blogging also contributes to a company website's search engine optimization (SEO) value, which affects its search engine result ranking, therefore driving more traffic to your website.  The more traffic to your website, the greater your chance of attracting qualified leads and potential customers.

Companies that blog on their websites have already seen significant benefits to their marketing campaigns.  According to recent data, the average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages.  As you may already assume, the greater the number of visitors to your website, the more popular your pages and subsequently your business.  Inbound links are when other websites reference to your link on their own site, which can direct their visitors to your website.  Indexed pages are how many of your pages are sorted by search engines, which allow them to be found in search results by users. 

In a recent study on ROI, HubSpot found that 69% of businesses attributed their lead generation success to blogging.  Lead generation consists of nurturing qualified leads into paying customers.  Blogging is a great opportunity to provide information to readers that is relative to what your company sells.  This helps to guide them along the path to trusting your company and gain an interest in what you could provide them.  In addition, 57% of businesses claimed to have acquired a customer through their company blog.  Not only are companies seeing more traffic to their website from blogging but also an increase in sales.  Information from blogging content helps readers to find answers to their problems or come across a product or service that they could benefit from.

Top 5 Tips to Creating a Successful Company Blog

1. Remarkable content.  Unique content stands out among the rest of the information on the Internet.  By creating useful, remarkable blog posts, you are attracting an audience that is looking for information that they do not already know.  Repeated information is boring and less likely to garner interest if it is the same as what everyone else is writing about.  Be sure to post information that is related to your industry as opposed to just your company.  You are trying to provide valuable information that helps position yourself as a subject matter expert in your industry.  You want users to come to you for advice and value your blog content information as opposed to feeling they are just being sold to.  Proper blog content consists of information that is of interest to your target audience, such as industry updates, news and important general information related to products or service that your company offers.  The information needs to matter to your audience and not bore nor interest them.  Content links can also direct to call-to-action landing pages, previous blog posts, free demos, newsletter sign up, product or service descriptions etc.
2. Social media.  After posting a new blog entry, it is important to update your other social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn with a direct link to the post.  This updates remind your followers, people who are interested in your company or industry, of new entries and drives additional traffic to your blog.  Also, by placing social media share links at the conclusion of your blog post, you are making it easier for readers to share your entry on their own social media accounts, which spreads your post to their followers as well.
3. Comment box.  Leaving the comment box option open allows readers to give feedback on what you wrote.  Many companies are hesitant to leave this option available due to negative feedback that could arise.  However, this gives you the perfect opportunity to speak directly to this person to quell any negatives and offer suggestions.  When people reply back with problems or questions, you are able to reply back with suggestions and advice that may lead them to your product or service to help solve their problems or make an informed decision about a potential purchase. Be sure to reply directly, by addressing them by name, to those who comment to show that you valuable their opinion or feedback.  In the case of unsolicited or inappropriate comment replies, you have the option to moderate comments before they are posted publicly, allowing you to delete if you deem necessary.
4. Keywords.  Posts including proper keywords help your blog entry get found in search engine results by users searching for that topic.  Be sure to develop a list of keywords relevant to your industry, product or service, company or location and try to use those words as often as you could without making the entry seem awkward.  Proper keyword placement and usage attributes to the SEO value of your blog, and subsequently your website.  This helps your website rank higher on search engine results, get found by qualified search users looking for that information and increasing traffic from organic searches, to your website.
5. Updating.  In order for your blog to be successful, it is vital to publish posts about 2-3 times a week.  Stale content does not draw interest to your website or add to your SEO as well as new content does.  By continuously updating your blog, you are showing your audience that you are a subject matter expert who stays keen to updates or alerts in your industry.  Maintaining an active blog allows you to generate a following as well as general interest in your blog.  By allowing readers to subscribe to your blog, by adding the RSS feed option, they are able to receive direct updates of when new content is added so they know to go to your website to view them.

Blogging is very important to a company's website and has a large impact on how it gets found by qualified leads.  A multitude of important factors of a website's SEO value that blogging can attribute to are keyword placement, updated content as well as how valuable its content is to users.  This would help your company's website rank higher in search engine results, therefore driving more traffic to your website.  By looking at the analytics of your blog posts and determining which gain the most views, you will learn which topics are most popular and are of interest to your readers.  This information could help you to determine what you could write about in future posts in an effort to gain more traffic.  More traffic means more interest and subsequently more qualified leads that can turn into valued, paying customers.