Hart Design Blog

Why Should You Have A Blog

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Created on Friday, 16 December 2011 13:21

The impact of business blogging extends to several major marketing benefits that marketers often overlook.

Blogging is a marketing asset strongly related to attracting high-quality traffic and generating new leads. Yet the impact of business blogging extends to several major marketing benefits that marketers often overlook. In this blog we'll seek to draw the big picture that highlights the benefits of business blogging. We will elaborate on the different ways through which your blog can bring you marketing success, from expanding your visibility on the web, through creating a strong influence in the industry, to effectively capturing new leads.

First

First, business blogging helps you in respect to search engine optimization (SEO). The more blog posts you publish, the more indexed pages you create for search engines to display in their results. In other words, business blogging helps you rank in search engines and get found when people search for industry-specific products or services. Thus, the blog enables you to attract organic traffic and familiarize people with your business.

Frequency Matters

In this framework, frequency of publishing blog posts matters a lot. Our research has shown that businesses that blog 16 to 20 times per month get over two times more traffic than those that blog fewer than four times per month.

Optimize Your Posts

The other essential element of attracting more traffic through organic search is optimizing your blog posts. Make sure your blog titles incorporate industry keywords that people enter in search engines as they conduct research.

The Keyword Post

What is the most important search engine keyword that you have not blogged about? Take that keyword, write a blog post about it. Blogging is a great tool for driving search engine traffic. Take advantage of it!

Second

Second, your blog is an asset that positions you as a thought leader. So have some industry-specific information to share, a blog will help you people’s trust and stay top-of-mind for many in your community.

Be a Problem Solver

Name the biggest problem your customers have. With that problem in mind, write a detailed blog post that provides practical and non-product focused solutions. Solve your customers’ problems with content.

Build Thought Leadership

Use your blog as a platform to showcase your expertise on a given subject. Inject your knowledge of the industry into your blog posts, and make a clear distinction between your brand and your competition.

Earn People's Trust

In a recent survey, we asked respondents how much blogs affected their purchasing decisions. How often does one proceed to a purchase decision with blogging research? 71% of respondents said that blogs affect their purchasing decisions either somewhat or very much.

Third

Third, a blog gives you valuable real estate to place calls-to-action in order to generate leads. At this stage of the game, you are trying to retain your blog readers and engage them further with your website
and your content. So you might ask them to attend your webinar or download a free guide that you have. Calls-to-action introduce your prospects into the buying process and start qualifying them.

Make Blog CTAs Contextual

Make sure you are matching the content you have written to the offer you want to highlight. In that way, you create a seamless connection between the two and cater to the reader who is ready to learn more about the topic. This is a very natural way of gauging interest and capturing leads. The contextual call-to-action is going to be much more appealing and have a much higher click-through rate to the subsequent landing page.

CTAs in Sidebar

One possible placement of calls-toaction is the sidebar of your blog. You can create banners to advertise some of your top-performing offers and add them around your blog for visitors to click on.

CTAs in Blog Posts

You can place calls-to-action within the blog post itself, at the beginning, middle or end of the article. Also, don’t forget to create contextual calls-to-action, by hyperlinking keywords to appropriate offers that you have.