4 Reasons Why You Should Be Creating A Blog

If you’re on the fence or completely against creating a blog for your company, you may want to change your mind. According to one study by HubSpot, 79% of companies that bog have reported a positive ROI. Essentially, there is really no reason not to be blogging, as a blog is a low cost tool that comes with four amazing benefits that I have illustrated below. 1. Updates One of the best reasons to create a blog is so that your website remains updated. SEO experts agree that a fresh website helps increase rankings in search engines. This suggests that websites that are not blogging are more likely to be buried in search engine ranking by their blogging competitors. In general, blogging shouldn’t be a burden to your or your time, as it’s unnecessary to blog multiple times every day. In fact, most experts recommend blogging at least once a week. 2. Expertise Blogging is such a valuable tool to you, the business owner, as it allows you to be viewed by the outside world as an expert. Establishing your expertise through a blog comes with a variety of benefits. First, your expertise will keep coming to your site for leading industry information. In addition, establishing yourself as an expert increases the odds that other websites will link to your website. In turn, the more external links you have coming back to your website, the better your site will perform in terms of both search engine rankings and website visits. 3. Channel to customers Blogs are the 3rd most influential digital resource when making overall purchasing decisions, according to a study by Technorati. What makes blogs so influential is that is allows customers to feel connected to your brand, especially when your writing is personable. Blogs also allow for customers to interact with you and other customers through feedback and conversations. Overall, this helps your customers to feel connected to your brand and allows you to learn about the likes and dislikes of your customers. 4. Leads Creating a blog is truly one of the best ways to grow your client base. Statistics illustrate that businesses that blog acquire more customers and generate more leads. The reason blogging works is because every time you post a blog, you’re increasing the likeliness that your page shows up in search engines, which will drive traffic to your site. Also, every blog post gives you and your readers something to share on social media platforms, which allows you to connect with the 1.73 billion people who use social media sites. Finally, having people sign-up for future blog posts via email subscriptions creates a list of potential customers for you to contact/market to in the future. With over 400 million people viewing more than 19 billion blogs each month, it’s easy to say that consumers want companies to have blogs. In fact, 81% of companies consider blogs “useful,” “important,” or “critical,” as it establishes a trust that, in turn, increases sales. With all this in mind, there truly is no better time to start a blog.

5 Tools for More Engaging Content

In previous articles including my SEO for beginners guide, I discussed the importance of producing high quality content. Companies and people use blogs as a channel to engage consumers and increase website traffic. Blogs with engaging content are rewarded by search engines. The problem, however, is the idea of having to produce high quality content on a continuing basis. This concept scares many beginners from even starting to blog. The great news, however, is that there are tips that everyone can use to write posts that are engaging and SEO friendly. We’ll start by looking at the first component needed. 1. Interesting Title With over 2 million blog posts written each day, the ability to grab a reader’s attention and sway them from clicking on the competition is harder than ever before. Simply put, there’s a lot of noise out there. As marketing guru, Seth Godin once said, “The only way to stand out from the noise is to become a purple cow.” Simply put, unique and catchy titles are the best way to increase click rates and traffic to your website. 2. Short and Precise 55% of readers spend less than 15 seconds on an article. For the half still reading, the need to be concise in your writing is vital. Avoid sentences that contain a lot of fluff by re-reading all your work before you post. Remember, the shorter you can make your sentences, the better and more engaging your content will be. 3. Videos Most blogs only use pictures and infographics to engage readers. Sites that only contain pictures and graphs are missing out on an even better tool for engaging readers and increasing their SEO. Videos are highly affective at increasing backlinks. In fact, posts that include videos increase inbound links 3 times more than plain text posts. Also, blogs that contain a video increase the amount of time a person spends on the post by 100%. 4. Pictures Although I mentioned that videos are more affective than blogs with pictures, this doesn’t mean to avoid using pictures all together. Studies show that articles with images receive 94% more total views than posts without images. Overall, images help make a post more attractive to read compared to just text, and keeps the attention of the reader. 5. Keywords The point of any post is to gain traffic to your site. In order to do this, keywords will be necessary. Ideally, you want to use 1 to 2 long-tail keywords for each post. The reason being is to avoid coming off as spam to search engines. If your content has too many keywords, search engines will penalize your post and website. Putting it all together Overall, before starting any blog post, write out what your main topic is. From here, you’ll be able to decide what you want to discuss, which keywords make the most sense for your post, and a catchy title to go with it. Finally, deciding your topic before you write will make your writing more precise and focus, and will allow you to decide which pictures and/or video makes the most sense for your post. By mastering these steps, you’ll be well on your way to writing high quality content.