Does blogging help your business grow?

As an entrepreneur you’ve probably seen a lot of businesses with a blog. We all know blogging is hard work and it can take up a lot of your valuable time. You should know by now that in any business, time equals money. So it is just right that you should invest it carefully.

So the question on your lip is, if it is worth my time to invest it in a blog for your business.

You are after all constantly selling on social media, sending out your email newsletters and constantly responding to your emails. (Oh, and if you want to know more about email marketing, you can read it here)

A lot of businesses just see it as an annoying must have for their businesses. Just because they see others do it. Doing it just because others do it is not a good enough reason. You need to make sure that if you decide to blog, you must make sure that it is in line with your business goals.

After reading the advantages that a blog has for your business, you will see why it is not something you should take lightly. It shouldn’t be something you rush just to put something up. Doing it right from the get go will help your business and marketing in more ways than you think.

Advantages of a blog for your small business

1. SEO – Search Engine Optimization
   That ever important word that we just can’t get enough of. Search engines just love constant, fresh content. By constantly adding new content to your blog, you give search engines like Google new content to index. Your all-important key words will help to increase your visibility on search engine result pages (SERPS).
2. Establish you/your business as an industry leader
   By providing valuable and expert information to potential and existing customers, you not only add value to their businesses, but also establish yourself as a trusted resource for helpful and informative information. This is especially important if you are a small business, trying to compete with larger companies.
3. Developing crucial relationships
   People always feel more comfortable buying from someone they know and trust. Blogging gives you a way to interact with existing and potential customers. That is why responding to customers comments on blog posts is super important. By connecting to them as a “person” they start to build a relationship with you. Commenting to a faceless company somehow just doesn’t have the same effect on people.
4. Connection people to your brand
   People trust people, not faceless companies. You become the link between customers and your brand. That is why it is very important especially for entrepreneurs and small businesses to take the saying that you should be your brand, to heart. For this, blogging is also a wonderful way to showcase your standards, vision and brand personality.
5. Create opportunity for sharing
   Each blog post you write, brings along ample opportunity for you and your audience to share your content via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and email. This results in that awesome thing all businesses (especially new ones) crave, free marketing. This is also considered way more trustworthy than any other conventional marketing efforts. Bringing us back to the concept of people trusting people. Hearing a company is awesome from a friend will convince anyone more to consider them rather than a regular ad.
6. It helps converting traffic into leads
   People clicking through to your blog, already have an interest in what you have to say. Since your blog is directly related to your product or service, it makes the reader already a potential customer. By adding a call to action on every blog post, you gain valuable access to turn a potential customer into a buy customer.
7. Increase product exposure
   A blog is a wonderful platform where you can educate prospective customers on your product features or service benefits. By adding photos and/or video, you can showcase real time use of it, enhancing its benefits. You can even extend the value of this by getting guest bloggers to review your services or products, giving you the opportunity to tap into markets that you might not have reach in any other traditional way.

So it is very clear that if you decide to blog, it forms the heart of your content marketing efforts. It in effect doesn’t cause you to have more work. Instead, it helps you to create good quality content that is focused on the core of your business. It also helps to drive traffic back to your website, where you can actively showcase and sell your services or products.

In my opinion, the same time spent on writing a blog post and creating the images for social sharing, will deliver a far better return on investment of your time, opposed to just creating “pretty quotes” that doesn’t speak from your main business goals as the heart of the message.

I know that creating good images for your blog for social sharing might even be a tough task.

But I have just the absolute must have solution!

Hop on over and get your own custom designed social media templates here.

I will help you designing templates that you can edit yourself in a jiffy, saving you some more of that valuable time of yours! Spending your time on tasks that is aligned with your main business goals is after all far more important!

So sit down on think carefully before you start your blog. Plan carefully and always remember that whatever you write must always be of high quality, useful information to your readers and speak with your business and its main goal at the heart of it.

That is all for today.

Till next time!