The Ex(ternal) Factors
Resting Pitch Face
If your business doesn’t have a blog, you could be making a fatal mistake. For long-term online success, it’s crucial to have a space in which your business is able to post articles, news and latest thought-pieces. It may seem like a hassle to have to do so, but the reality is that it brings with it a multitude of benefits for long-term online success.
In simple, creating blog content can translate into more sales and more customers for your business – and who can argue with that kind of content marketing success?
We all want more website visitors, and consistently creating valuable blog content can get them for you, largely thanks to search engine optimisation (SEO). When people are searching for your website, the ones who type your URL straight into their browser are most likely existing customers. If you were to ‘buy’ customers from an e-mail list or some such, you’d be entering into murky illegal waters. And if you place a lot of adverts to get customers, it can be pricey.
But basic SEO is something you can do across your site. Essentially, it relates to the organic searches people conduct across Google and other search engines. When they put in key search terms (e.g. ‘florists in London’), Google reads the words on your site to see if it might be an accurate match and then pulls up all the relevant content.
You want your website to get found by Google, because this is what drives traffic to you. Therefore, the more content you have on your site with more keywords featured, the higher the chance is of this happening, and you can pack blog content with relevant content and key words.
It is important that you are consistent with creating long-term valuable content, as once Google has found you and ranked you highly, that doesn’t mean you have snagged yourself a permanent spot. You’ll have to keep working hard to keep that ranking.
We all know that social media holds a huge amount of importance, especially in lead generation. When you post valuable blog content on your platforms, this can be shared or read by your network. It may bring new customers your way, or may have older customers clicking on your blog to read more and finding themselves on a journey through to your sales page, thanks to carefully placed site adverts and call-to-action buttons. Creating valuable long-term blog content enables you to have a strong social media presence, and where you keep showing up on people’s radar, you keep driving traffic to your site.
Content marketing success comes when blogs answer questions for customers and serve as being consistently helpful. You become seen as an authority who they can go to whenever they have a problem.
There’s a lot to be said for helping to clear up a customer’s confusion. It also helps them understand the identity of your business, and gain a sense of your company personality and brand voice.
The best part about blogs is that posts have long-term value to you that shorter advertisements can’t match. Online blog content gets immediate views thanks to being posted on social media and featured in newsletters, but the views also keep ticking up over time – the great thing about online posts is that they never quite disappear.
Your blog will continue working hard for your business, largely thanks to how it ranks in search engines. This means the blog post will keep driving new traffic your way, generating dozens of potential leads, even if it’s just sitting there while you make more content.
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