Do you need a way to grow your brand and audience? Do you need to start producing more content to keep your business visible?
A blog is one of the best ways to leverage and grow your business today. Starting and maintaining a blog is vital for:
Developing and nurturing your brand
Growing your audience
Business Visibility
This is particularly relevant for startup businesses (in the first year or so of trading), and businesses that are struggling to get a foothold.
In this post, I'll cover seven key reasons why businesses should have a blog. A blog helps you to:
7 Reasons to Start a Blog For Your Business
1. You can showcase your expertise
Writing blog posts gives you a unique opportunity to show off your knowledge and experience. Blogging isn't about putting random thoughts onto the page or documenting your life experiences - although that works for certain blogging niches such as travel and food and drink.
Most business blogs create posts relating to their industry. For example, the posts on my blog centre around writing because I am a ghostwriter. It allows me to demonstrate and share my knowledge to build credibility
That is one of the primary goals of a blog - to build up a level of expertise and trust that puts your business in an expert light. This leads to my second point ...
2. It helps you stay up-to-date and competitive in your industry
Following on from my second point, starting a blog and writing blog posts helps you in two key ways:
By researching for your posts, you stay up-to-date on the current trends, topics, and knowledge in your industry.
Having a well-informed and thriving blog helps you stand out amongst your competitors.
A lot of businesses and companies are using blogs to their advantage. Some examples include:
Each blog utilises its industry knowledge to provide useful and relevant information to readers. Colgate, for example, provides information and tips on oral hygiene which link back to their products.
So, starting a blog is a great way to give your business a competitive advantage by providing useful and relevant information to readers, and ensuring you stay up-to-date in your industry.
3. It develops your brand voice
When you write content consistently, you start to recognise your unique writing style. For businesses, this is called your brand voice. Writing consistently allows you to develop and grow your brand voice into something unique that sets you apart from your competitors.
So, starting a blog is a brilliant way to begin writing consistently and developing your brand voice, as long as you stick to a regular posting schedule. For more on brand voice, check out the blog post below.
Top tip: when creating a posting schedule, start small. Aim for one post a month (as an example) and gradually increase that number until you reach a schedule you are comfortable with. The last thing you want to do is promise to write a post a day and burn out quickly.
4. It's great for SEO
There are two ways to look at this. Firstly, keywords. Blog posts are a great way to use the main keywords of your website, further cementing your search engine ranking.
The primary keywords of each blog post - relevant to the topic covered - also help to rank the pages higher up (if done correctly). Additionally, a great blog post structure with appropriate headings and the use of numbers strengthens your ranking. So, blog posts that are optimised for SEO will rank higher on search engines and therefore draw people to your brand.
Secondly, posting regularly on a website blog will keep that website updated, which also benefits your website's SEO ranking. A website that is consistently updated with new content tells search engines that the website is active, and active websites tend to rank higher because they are indexed more often (due to the new content). So that's even more of an incentive to start a blog and start posting consistently.
5. It keeps your brand visible
Following on from the previous point, having a blog, posting regularly, and sharing your content all contribute to the visibility of your brand. Having high-ranking blog posts on search engines will draw people to your brand and thus your business. This generates a wider audience from which you can grow your customer base.
Sharing and promoting fresh content on your social channels also keeps your current audience informed and aware of your business. All this benefits your brand visibility.
6. It curates a niche audience that stays loyal to your brand
Blogging is a form of content writing. In another post, I talked about the main differences between copywriting and content writing, one of which is that content writing is intended to inform and educate the reader.
Educational and informational content naturally curates a niche audience that is interested and invested in your content. Over time, this makes them more loyal to your brand and more likely to make a purchase.
This strategy does not work overnight, however. Blogging and content writing are part of a long-term marketing strategy, one that won't have immediate results but will generate them over time.
For more on the differences between copywriting and content writing (and their various uses in marketing strategies), check out the post below.
7. You can easily repurpose your content
The final, and probably most overlooked reason, for starting a blog is that the blog content can be repurposed elsewhere.
What is repurposing? Repurposing means taking something you created and fashioning it into something new. Here are some examples of how you can repurpose blog posts into new content:
The content in a list post can be used to create a checklist.
Content from several blog posts can be combined and repurposed into a marketable eBook.
Snippets of information and statistics can be used in social posts.
A blog post can be used to create a video
The possibilities are endless. But be careful: repurposing does not mean copying. You need to find some way of transferring content over into a new format and creating something new and fresh out of it. An eBook composed entirely of blog posts that have been copied word-for-word is frankly lazy - unless you have decided to compile your blog posts into a compendium for others to read.
Over To You
So, those are seven essential reasons why you should start a blog for your business. The key takeaway for you is a business blog is a brilliant way to grow your brand awareness and visibility through consistent and high-quality content. But be aware that a blog is not a solution that will work overnight - content writing gets better results over time.