For the longest time, blog posts were the go-to content for business to business (B2B) websites. Back before Google was able to identify white text and keyword stuffing, blog posts would generate significant traffic with ease.
Those days are long gone. The blog page is one of the first places we visit when looking through a new website. It’s a great place to get additional information, see what sort of content they’re creating and whether the business can keep their blog active.
The problem we’re finding is that active blogs are becoming rarer by the day. In the grand scheme of the marketing world, blogs can seem less important than social media and affiliate marketing due to their long term focus.
That said, blog posts have the potential to be the most efficient piece of marketing you can spend your time on. Let’s run through some of the key benefits you could see by focusing on creating blog content.
1 | A Powerful Source of Traffic
Blogging with an SEO strategy in mind can quickly become one of the most vital methods for increasing your organic page traffic. According to Bloggingwizard, companies that blog get 55% more visitors than companies that don’t.
Depending on your strategy, you could see a rise in visitors higher than this over your competitors. Why? Because each blog post creates a new searchable page on your website. By focusing on keywords, metadata and topic choice, you can begin to develop numerous pages designed to answer a question or query, increasing your chances of ranking organically.
While page views are a sought after metric, we focus more on the customer journey once someone finds your website. Being able to direct them from a blog post to a service page or landing page via a call to action
2 | Trust-building & Positioning
Nothing cements your positioning more than having a back catalogue of helpful information about your niche or industry. Having a space for your audience to learn from you or learn more about your product/service helps build trust. You’re effectively reassuring your audience that you are the right people to learn and buy from.
This level of positioning will help retain your audience and have them coming back to learn more, rather than finding a different source to fill that need.
3 | Create A Marketing Goldmine
You might be finding it challenging to consistently create new content for your audience, especially if you aren’t outsourcing your marketing. Running a business takes significant time out of the day, making content creation an in-the-moment process.
Investing the time into blog post creation provides you with a substantial piece of content to draw back from. Repurposing a singular 1000 word blog post can result in multiple pieces of content, social shares for the blog and an opportunity to experiment with different content types such as audio-video.
This level of repurposing isn’t time-bound either. You can continue to leverage this blog post in the future and draw upon it whenever you need a piece of content on the fly. Similarly, coming back to your post and updating it with new information keeps it fresh for new viewers.
4 | Blogs Generate long-term Results
The biggest reason we see new businesses failing to adopt blog content is the focus on long-term success. Unlike social media, for example, where you can receive responses from your audience in mere moments, blog posts can take longer to generate passive traffic.
Imagine generating new leads while you’re asleep or working on your business; that would be great, right?
Getting to that point requires the time or budget to do so. Once complete, the blog post will get ranked by Google and continue to bring in traffic for years to come, assuming it was written with SEO in mind. What’s more, is you can monetize your blog content once it gains more traction.
Whether you do so through affiliate marketing, discounts and offers or add advertisements to the page, you can still turn it into another source of income for you or your business.
Content that pays for itself? Yes, please.
5 | Engage with and build a community
This benefit is seen more with business to customer (B2C) blogs but is still a powerful benefit for B2B businesses. By enabling comments on your posts, you allow your viewers and audience to comment and engage with the content. Responding as a business helps to develop your brand personality further while directly engaging with individual customers.
A message from a business you follow can mean the world to some people and can go a long way to building relationships. We often find that our client’s audience leaves thought-provoking questions and responses when uploading a new post. We then use these for content ideas in the future, further providing additional value without any extra effort on your behalf.
Implementing Your own Blog Strategy.
While you can start your own blog by creating content around the first ideas that come to mind, it is far more beneficial and time-efficient to have a strategy before doing so.
If you have the budget, outsourcing your blog content is the simplest way to ensure that it’s created with a long-term SEO mindset. If that isn’t possible, start by considering what information your customers need to know about your service or product. Once you have an idea, try searching that question or query in Google.
What results appear?
If you see results from big named brands, that particular question or query might be challenging to rank for, whereas if the results redirect to forum responses or low-quality content, it might be a perfect place to start.
Understanding the SEO behind content doesn’t need to be complicated. We recently wrote a blog post covering this exact topic, which you can read here.
Blogging is all about getting stuck in and writing. Plan the content ahead of time and plan how you will reuse the content to get the most out of your time spent creating.
