Why You Should Use Blogs to Market Your Business

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Publishing a blog as part of your small business marketing is a relatively easy, inexpensive way to enhance your marketing efforts, drive traffic to your site, and attract more prospective clients.

More and more business leaders, entrepreneurs and freelancers are using blogs to increase income and generate business growth.

Although blogging requires the discipline of researching, creating and writing information of value, it’s a relatively easy, inexpensive way to enhance your marketing efforts, drive traffic to your site, and attract more prospective clients.

In their 2012 Inbound Marketing Report, Hubspot reported that 57% of companies who have a blog acquired a customer from their blogging efforts. In fact, three of my most important clients came to me through this blog.

If that’s not proof enough that blogs are an effective marketing tool, below I’ve listed 5 reasons why you should use blogs to market your business.

1. Create Brand Awareness. Blogging is a cheap way to get people to notice your brand online.

When you create a company blog that provides value to other businesses in the same industry, other blogs and websites will link to you and share your content on social media networks, thereby creating massive exposure for your brand.

2. Boost Search Engine Optimization. Search engines love fresh content. What better way to provide frequent content than with blog posts.

By blogging consistently, you give Google and other search engines new content to index and you create opportunities to plug in those all-important keywords to increase your visibility on search engine results pages.

3. Establish Your Expertise. Having well researched and well-written articles on your blog will position your company and yourself as a trusted resource and expert in your field.

This is especially important for freelancers and small businesses looking to gain credibility to compete with larger companies.

4. Build a Community of Customers. The whole concept of “community” is a recent trend in the dynamics of marketing and targeting.

Popular blogs become profitable blogs. Blogs become more popular the same way websites become popular: by marketing them.

5. Generate Leads. By regularly creating solid content, you can actually generate leads from your readers. You do this by adding a call to action at the end of your blog content asking readers to sign up for your email list in return for a free download (such as a white paper or eBook).

Generating leads in this manner isn’t possible without having blog content.

The Bottom Line

With minimal effort and expense, you can build credibility, boost search engine rankings, increase website traffic, and foster relationships with potential and current customers.

This is an opportunity no small business should pass up.

 

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