Written by John Dosic of firstsiteguide.com
Blogging is not a pastime anymore, nor is it a hobby. It stopped being that a long time ago. Today, it serves many purposes but it has the biggest impact on digital marketing.
Small businesses and freelancers have been utilizing blogging to achieve various goals and have understood its role much better than big businesses.
The reason why big businesses are still struggling with digital marketing in general is the fact that they are used to utilizing traditional marketing forms. This means that they are paying for immediate exposure based on the marketers average performance in the past. This type of exposure is based on the ratings, positioning and so on.
The digital marketing environment is quite different. It allows us to grow our influence and develop an independent marketing outlet we can use to engage, convert, educate, network and do market research. All of this is nearly impossible to achieve without a well-established blog and here is why.
1. SEO benefits
Most big businesses use blogs in a very rudimentary way. The common practice is to fill it with 5-10 articles and leave it be. In a lot of cases, they even avoid creating true blog content and they decide to opt for PR releases, company-related news and so on. Sure, this will help you come up in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) a bit, but the benefits of this are so small that they can be disregarded.
Focusing on creating an active blog populated with quality content that focuses on niche related subjects, on the other hand, will help you attract more organic traffic. It sends a signal to search engine crawlers that you are keeping your website active. The more posts you have, the more sources you can get traffic from. This positively impacts your rankings, domain authority and conversion rates.
2. Brand humanization
The biggest problems big companies face is communicating their message and avoiding that corporate image in the online environment. Blogging is one of the most effective ways to put a human face on a big company, especially if the blog is populated by articles written by company members. A blog post allows you to speak directly to your target audience and engage them in a conversation that is directly related to the niche you’re in. This allows you to explain your business model more directly, gain insight into your current and potential customers’ concerns, publicly address them and so on.
3. Social media integration
Most business social media pages are desolate places with a humble following and even poorer engagement. The reason for this is the fact that almost nothing happens there. Without the content you can share on social media, you can hardly expect an audience reaction. Sure, you can share other people’s niche related content, but this means that you are diverting your own traffic to someone else.
Without a quality blog to which you can redirect your traffic, you have no way of getting them to visit your website. Furthermore, email newsletters tend to make a lot more sense and engage more people if they are filled with new post updates, as compared to generic business focused updates like sales information, new product updates, etc.
4. Inbound link generation
One of the most effective ways to promote yourself online is through guest posting, but what a lot of businesses don’t realize is that it is unethical to request to be linked on a popular blog through a directly promotional link. A lot of work goes into creating a blog that the audience trusts and reads which means that “vulgar” promotional linking can damage its credibility and destroy its reputation, which takes years to build.
Quality blog content lets you avoid this and arrange mutually beneficial posts on popular blogs. Furthermore, natural inbound linking also happens when you share great content. All of this helps a business broaden its influence and reach more people as a niche expert, instead of a ruthlessly aggressive brand that is only interest in promoting itself.
Creating a blog is a complicated process and there are a lot of steps you need to go through to make it work for your brand specifically. These benefits start to become apparent after a short time, if things are done properly and, the longer you are active, the bigger its impact gets. Don’t expect immediate results and focus on quality and consistency. After all, you are working on creating a public voice for your company and this doesn’t happen overnight.