7 Benefits of Blogging for Startups and Small Businesses
Prospective clients often ask me what’s the single most effective tactic a startup or small business can do to jumpstart their inbound marketing efforts—to increase traffic to their websites. They always look skeptical when I say simply: “Blogging. No really, blogging. That’s it.” Then I smile and qualify my statement: “Okay, high-quality blogging.”
Of course, I’m only being half-serious here, but generally speaking if you own or manage a business of any sort, blogging is exactly what you need to capture the attention of your potential customers. And this is especially true if you run a startup or small business, which are often under intense pressure to grow their business. In fact, startups and small businesses gain several critical benefits of blogging.
And this holds true even if your business has already invested in extensive inbound marketing efforts and/or built a gorgeous website with a flawless user experience design. Your inbound marketing or glossy website won’t help your business reach its potential unless it has depth. And depth—both literal and figurative—is exactly what a blog provides.
Blogging provides literal depth by increasing the number of “pages” on your site. Businesses with sites that have 401-1000 web pages literally get six times more leads than those with 51-100 pages (Source). It works like this. Google and other search engines analyze the depth of a website to try to ascertain if the site is legitimate [read “trust-worthy”] and not fraudulent—i.e., not a temporary, spam/clickbait, or poorly managed site. The more authoritative and legitimate your website appears, the more likely it is that Google will trust it and rank it highly in search. Blog pages rich with search terms (keywords) will improve your search engine optimization (SEO) push, magnify your current inbound marketing efforts and make even more prospective customers aware of your business's existence.
But blogging also provides figurative depth simply in the way it humanizes your website not only by providing industry-relevant insights, anecdotes and valuable information that benefit your target demographic, but also by giving your brand a “voice.” Let’s take a closer look at why blogging is essential for your inbound marketing strategy. Here are 7 benefits of blogging for startups and small businesses:
1) Blogging Drives Traffic to Your Company's Website
Blogging is one of the best ways to increase awareness of your company's existence. After all, what chance do you have of growing your customer base if people don’t even know that your business exists? An informative and regularly-updated blog containing industry-focused keywords will direct prospective customers to your website.
“Consider that websites that blog regularly receive 55% more traffic and over 80% more leads compared to websites that don’t. ”
Blogs with 52 or more posts will see an increase of blog traffic by up to 77% (Source)
Websites with a blog are proven to have more than 434% indexed pages listed on Google (Source)
Businesses that blog gain 97% more referral links back to their websites (Source)
This phenomenon occurs thanks to highly complex search engine algorithms that gauge the quality and relevancy of content to user search terms. This doesn’t mean that you should spend half your day creating insightful blog articles that are jam-packed with keywords pertaining to your line of work. The truth is that Google and other search engines actually penalize web content that are stuffed with keywords, poorly written, or low quality.
But the bottom line is that each blog post you write becomes one more indexed page on your website, which is simply just a fancy way of saying that it provides one more opportunity for your company to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your site.
It might not happen in the first couple of days or even the first couple of weeks after content is posted to your blog. However, a considerable increase in traffic will eventually occur and your organization's bottom line will benefit in the long run.
2) High-Quality, Relevant Blog Posts Increase Conversions and Generate More Leads
“Consider that 61% of US customers have made a purchase primarily based on a blog post. ”
In particular, B2B brands with blogs gain 67% more leads than the ones without (Source)
At least 57% of companies with a blog have acquired a customer from their blog (Source)
69% of businesses attribute their lead generation success to blogging (Source)
47% of buyers viewed three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep (Source)
Too many business owners make the mistake of posting anything and everything to their blog, website and social media accounts. Though this tactic certainly makes online visitors and social media followers aware of the business's presence, it also alienates those individuals. The bottom line is that you need to be extremely careful to prevent your business from becoming a nuisance. This is precisely why the quality of your blog content matters so much.
Imagine a scenario in which a prospective customer needs the service or product that your company provides. He hops onto one of the world wide web's search engines and types in what he needs or desires along with the name of his city. He sees your website on the first couple of search page results, clicks the link and is redirected to one of your blog articles containing the word(s) he typed into the search engine. If the blog article he lands on contains only a passing reference to what he is interested in or if it is filled with industry-relevant keywords and little insight, the customer is unlikely to patronize your business.
Alternatively, imagine a scenario in which the same customer clicks the search engine results link and is redirected to your blog to find an insightful article about the topic that piqued his interest. The blog content engages his mind, provides helpful information to solve his problem(s) and leaves a lasting impression. Such a customer will be highly inclined to purchase goods and/or services from your company in the future. This is exactly what a blog is meant to do.
3) Blogging Increases Social Media Impact
Inbound marketing is all about spending as little time, effort and money as possible on outbound marketing tactics to attract customers to your business. Advertising on traditional mediums like TV, radio and newspapers no longer make financial sense for most businesses. Those conventional advertising methods are quite costly and they reach the masses rather than individuals who actually need or desire exactly what a business provides. The time to shift your attention to inbound marketing is now.
“New digital tools have emerged making it possible for individuals and businesses to make millions of dollars online without having to shoulder the often prohibitive costs associated with starting, running, and promoting a real business. The traditional barriers to enry do not exist anymore. Smart marketers can now reach mass media auiences without spending millions of dollars, simply by ranking well on Google, Bing, or YouTube, and being influential on social networks.
”
But even if you have shifted to inbound marketing, digital marketing lead-generation tools like PPC advertising can be cost-prohibitive for young startups or small businesses. If you have an excellent paid search strategy or have figured out how to increase inbound marketing results with paid ads, chances are you’re still paying a premium for leads that you can get at a fraction of the cost through a blogging strategy that leverages social media.
The beauty of writing high-quality, relevant blog posts and leveraging social media to promote them is that they will multiply the impact of your social media efforts and drive traffic to your website for free.
Consider what an individual does after reading a helpful blog post that sheds light on how to solve a problem or educates him about the nuances of your business's particular industry. There’s a good chance that he will share the blog post with his social circle by posting it to his Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account. He might even e-mail a link to the helpful blog article to his friends and family. Or maybe he will post the blog article's link to an online message board in an effort to help others. As a result, everyone who is exposed to the blog article will be inclined to share it with their social circle, check out your other blog posts and visit your business's social media pages. Think of it as a snowball rolling down a hill that just keeps getting bigger and bigger as it accumulates more snow. This is the magic of blogging. Can I get an “Amen”?
4) A Blog Humanizes your Brand by Giving Your Business a “Voice”
Think of your business's blog as a means of humanizing a somewhat static website. It’s awfully challenging to incorporate any personality into a homepage, especially given that there is so little “space” to say anything given current mobile-first web standards.
In contrast, a blog is an online podium of sorts that allows you to inject some personality and passion into your company's web content. It puts a figurative “face” on your company, communicating to visitors who the people are behind the website, product or brand. Would you buy from someone you didn’t know? Would you buy from someone you couldn’t trust? By putting a face on your company, the blog humanizes your company and its products. The blog, in other words, can help you convey your business’s brand promise and values in a way that inspires trust and builds brand loyalty.
So if you have a strong writing voice, let it shine through in your blog posts. If you struggle to express yourself with the written word, hire a content marketing agency or a professional freelance writer to create thought-provoking content on your behalf. Update your company's blog on a regular basis with meaningful and informative content and it will forge deep bonds with your target audience. These potential customers will view your website in a totally different light if they stumble upon blog content that is centered on improving their lives. Furthermore, they will be much more likely to return to your company's website and blog as time progresses because they will be curious as to what types of helpful information has been recently posted.
5) Blogging Legitimizes Your Brand and Your Business
One of the primary reasons why people venture on over to a business's blog is to determine if the company has credible authority. If your company has a social media presence and a website, but lacks a blog, plenty of prospective customers will become suspicious in regards to its legitimacy. You are an expert in your industry niche so why not put your knowledge on display with insightful blog articles? This is your chance to flex your intellectual muscle and show your customers what you are really all about. Don't fret if you lack writing prowess. If you can provide genuinely useful and helpful tips and advice, you will still be able to provide valuable content, which will help your blog rank higher and ensure that you have return visitors.
Posts that answer customer questions or shed light on industry happenings will generate considerable goodwill with potential customers. Even if your blog posts help your targeted customers solve a seemingly minor problem, it will be worth the effort as it establishes your company as an authority. This is one of the best ways to generate important in-roads with your audience. If they derive some sort of benefit from your blog posts, they will return for future virtual visits as well as visits to your brick and mortar location. Furthermore, they won't be as cynical about your sales staff's intentions now that they've determined that your company's true aim is to help rather than sell.
6) Blogging Can Build Customer Loyalty by Recycling Traffic
“It’s 7 times more expensive to acquire a customer than to keep one”
If you’re in B2B or in B2C with longer sales cycles, your customer will likely consume at least 3 to 5 pieces of content before they make a purchase. In general the more expensive the purchase the longer the sales cycle and the longer it takes to get a “sale.” Therefore in order to get sales and increase conversions you need helpful, educational content on your site that will guide your buyer on their journey from lead to customer. Since so few prospective customers will consume 5 pieces of content in one sitting, you need a content mechanism that will give your visitors a reason to come back over and over again. And once a lead is converted to a customer, you’ll need an even more compelling reason to get your customer to come back and make a second or third purchase. You’ll need, in short, a device that helps promote customer loyalty.
So how does a blog help with converting a lead to a sale or cross-sell or upsell? Simple. High-quality, helpful blogs—especially those with subscriptions enabled—recycle your blog traffic. They take existing blog traffic and extract even more value from it by turning unique visitors into repeat visitors. Every time a visitor returns to your site the odds of conversion increase exponentially. And the more your current customers love your blog, especially the voice and personality you’ve created on it, the more loyal they will becoming, increasing their lifetime customer value or (LCV). In this way, the blog can not only help you acquire a customer, it can also help you keep a customer for life. Since it is 7 times more expensive to acquire a customer than to keep one, your blog shouldn’t just be working to attract visitors it should be working to keep them.
7) The Benefits of Blogging Accrue Exponentially
Did you know that 90% of the leads generated by many blogging juggernauts come from blog posts that were published in previous months (Source)? But what does that mean exactly? It means that high-quality, helpful blog posts actually become more valuable the more they age. While many immature bloggers push out a blog post and get deflated when they watch traffic increase to the post only to spike and crash a few days later, what they don’t realize is that the initial traffic crash to a blog post is actually the beginning—not the end—of its lifespan. That crash is likely the moment it’s indexed and will start to rank in Google SERPs. Over time, an exceptionally well crafted blog post will go on to increase traffic exponentially. Unlike so many other marketing tactics—especially social media or events that provide immediate value and then quickly fizzle out—blogging provides long-term benefits that increase over time.
Blog Post Traffic Over Time
Get Started Blogging
So while blogging is an incredibly effective strategy for increasing traffic to your website and leads to your business, it’s not easy. Startups and new businesses often don’t have the time to hammer out long, high-quality blog posts. They don’t know where to begin. Which blogging platform to choose. Don’t know which topics. And don’t have any ideas as to how to craft an effective content strategy for their blog. So what are your options.
1) DIY (Do It Yourself)
Okay, so yes, you can do it the hard way if you’re a glutton for punishment ;) To DIY your blogging you’ll need to:
Evaluate blog hosting platforms or content management systems like WordPress or Medium.
Install a CMS or set up your profile
Name and configure your blog and add widgets and plugins
Select a template or develop your own design
Craft a keyword strategy
Develop engaging, relevant blogging topics for your audience
And then start churning out multiple blog posts that are thousands of words each week for an infinite length of time.
But do you really have that time, skill or desire to do this level of work just to get your blog on the map? In other words, can you really go the distance? If you think about it and can’t answer this fundamental question affirmatively, then you need to move on to the next option.
2) Hire a Free-Lancer
If the first option doesn’t work for you, there is always option two. Go to sources like UpWork and Fivver to get a “free-lancer” to start blogging for you. Yeah, those scare quotes are quite intentional because I would seriously caution against option number two. I’ve worked with literally hundreds of free-lance writers or bloggers and I can tell you without reservation that 95% of them can’t write, aren’t experts in your domain, and are unreliable. In short, they are often a colossal waste of money. I can’t tell you how many late nights I spent rewriting a blog post from end-to-end that was written by a well-meaning free-lancer. Frustration doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling when you realize you are not only losing money, you’re actually paying others to do work you’re essentially doing yourself. A new law in California Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) also prevents free-lance writers from writing more than 35 blog posts for any given client, which means if your business is in CA, you’ll have to keep hiring more free-lancers to feed your blog, which increase the labor in managing the blog and degrades its quality as quality is bound to degrade with each new free-lancer you hire. In other words it makes working with freelancers even more stressful and unproductive than it already is. Ugh. Next.
3) Leverage a Marketing Agency
So why do it the hard way when you can do it the easy way? Why risk wasting your money on low quality blog posts written by untalented free-lancers that will likely cause your website to be penalized by Google when you could hire talented, reliable, experts who can do it all for you? In short, why not hire an agency and have the best of both worlds—effortless but high-quality blogging?
This is where Verge comes in. We help businesses make blogging easy for startups and small businesses with cost effective and flexible solutions. From content strategy to editorial calendars to blog writing and even inputting into a content management system, Verge can help you receive the 7 benefits of blogging by turning your blog into a powerhouse that will start attracting visitors to your website.