It recently occurred to me that something I do every week at ICS may not be immediately clear in its purpose or value; especially to other businesses. Blogging for our business is one of those things that I prioritize to ensure that we are putting out regular content weekly.

The value it brings may not be immediate, but it's definitely long-term. 

Creating a content strategy  should be an instrumental part of any business that is looking to expand their audience. Be aware when you are blogging that your posts are around relative subjects. For example, since we are a full service marketing agency, all of our blogs revolve around services that we offer.  This helps increase our online visibility by getting our business out in front of people looking for relevant products or services on the internet.

Why is this important for your business? 

Blogs Generate Website Traffic

Getting people to your website is one of the hardest things to do. Using different outlets like search engine optimization and pay-per-click can do a lot but generating new content gives people a reason to return to your website. 

When you are creating a blog post you are creating a new page for your website. Currently, your site likely doesn't have a lot of pages and of those pages, are any being updated regularly? Using blogs solves both of these problems. Each published blog is another page to be indexed by the search engines and when done properly, blogs help your social media. Coming up with original content is hard, so having a blog post to share regularly is one less piece of content your social media manager needs to worry about. 

It helps generate leads

The more traffic coming to your website, the more likely your leads will increase. Every website has a series of call-to-actions (CTA's) where you are trying to push your website visitors to take action on your website. Since your number of pages are often limited, blog posts allow for new forms of CTA's.
Since a blog post might be a good way to generate first time visitors to your website, you can try different type of CTA's that you might not be able to use on other parts of your website. 

The Buyer Persona Template is the perfect example of a CTA! 

You create trust and value

When creating a blog with value, you start to generate a loyal audience that look to you for information on the product or service you are writing about. This allows you the opportunity to become the expert in your field and is also ideal for your sales team. 
Creating regular content with value can help shorten your sales cycle. With most sales there is always a bit of hesitation or question before agreeing to buy. When you have documented what those hesitations might be; it allows your sales team to easily reference and provide a link to the potential customer with an answer to their concern, that they can read on their own terms. 

Creates Value Long-Term

Blogging is one of those things you might not benefit from right away but when done right you will see huge benefits in the future. When you first publish a blog you generally receive an instant boost in traffic but after a few days this likely dies down. The immediate boost of your blog dies but the long term just begins. As your blog ages it begins to be indexed in Google and other search engines. This means that you can start gaining traffic from that blog post, months and years down the road. 

It's easy to forget about old blog posts but that is the last thing you want to do. Re-using old blog posts by updating the publish date, adding more branded images, other relateable blogs or updating copy are just a few of the ways to generate new traffic through organic SEO without creating a ton of extra work for yourself by writing a new post. 

Ready to write? Download our checklist on what every blog should have before hitting publish. 

The Takeaway 

Although it might seem like an annoying task, blogging has a huge value for your business even though it is not immediately apparent. With page indexing, updates and content revisions to past blog posts you can see great value for your sales team and lead generation for months and years to come.