When I started outlining this post, I realized there were actually quite a few good reasons to blog for your business. So many, in fact, it would be overwhelming to include them all in a single post. I decided instead to present an abridged overview on each point, and then follow up on those points in detail in future posts.
While I don’t believe any of the information is superfluous, one purpose of blogging is to generate interest and create a following. Think of this post as a summary; a tool to spark your interest. Successive posts promise to explore each topic with more detailed information and thus, you, the reader, will be motivated to come back. Are my motives selfish? Perhaps. But hopefully I have taught you an important lesson in blogging- you’ve got to get your readers to come back for more.
As a quick primer, I’ll refer to Wikipedia’s definition of a blog.
“A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”)[1] is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”
Now, let’s get on to why ‘regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other materials’ will help you in achieving your business goals.
Establish Expertise and Credibility
Blogging helps you gain expertise in your industry and adds credibility to your business. When you write a post on a topic your company deals with, it not only helps you learn more about the topic, but it also illustrates your knowledge to current and potential clients. Readers gain a deeper understanding of what it is you do and how it can potentially help them in their business endeavors.
For example, if someone is looking for assistance with health care billing and your blog contains fifteen different posts about your company’s experience in that field, the reader will be inspired to seek you out and assist in the buying process.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engines love content, especially when that content is fresh, on topic, and easy for them to find and index.
Blogging allows your business to constantly feed search engines information about your business. Let’s say you wrote three articles with titles such as ‘Health Care Billing Best Practices,’ ‘Health Care Billing for Small Practices’ and ‘Making Health Care Billing Easy.’ You then would have three potential search results for the key phrase ‘health care billing.’ Each new blog post becomes a potential search result and gets potential customers to your website.
Another SEO advantage is that most blogging software automatically creates XML site maps and pings the search engines when new content is generated. An XML site map has the page title, permalink, and publish date. This gets fed directly into the search engines and they send what’s known as a spider to read and index your page.
So when you publish your ‘Health Care Billing Best Practices’ post, your blog software updates the site map and sends a ping to the search engines notifying them of new content. They download your site map, find your URLs and page titles, crawl the page, and add your blog post to the index. All of this happens in about an hour for popular, well established blogs.
Rapport with Clients and Potential Customers
At Atomicdust, we work with a wide range of companies that provide their clients with member-based services. These companies are always looking for ways to foster strong relationships with their customers. Blogging allows you to establish and maintain rapport with both existing and potential customers.
Nowadays, it is easy to become just a phone number, an email address, or a business card. Blogging gives your company personality, or puts a ‘face’ on your brand. The trick here is to connect with your readers. You are already generating content that is important to them, but you also need to convey a tone that is relatable. Customers not only want to like your work, they want to like you.
Blogging gives you another opportunity to shine a light on your company and all that it has to offer.
Let’s assume that one of your current customers is searching for information on a new health care billing company because they are unsure if the service you’re currently offering is fulfilling their business needs. This search lands them back on your website where they find your blog. If your blog properly showcases your services and expertise, the customer will find yet another reason to stay with your company.
Blogging is another vessel to further showcase your talent and personality. It gives current and potential clients a clear picture of your company’s knowledge and reinforces their decision to stay with you or begin a relationship.
Social Media
Social media is the new marketing buzzword. It’s a complex topic, but the basis is simple- social media is the sharing of information and receiving feedback on that information.
A blog allows you to easily push your information through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other outlets. When someone reads your new post, they tweet it to their followers who in turn end up on your site and then retweet the information to their followers.
A single tweet has the potential to reach thousands of readers, but reaching the right ones are important. Since most people are fairly cliquish, they usually have folllowers with similar interests and needs to their own. It’s a good bet that the person who reads your health care post has peers who would also benefit from reading it.
If you can target influential readers, entice them with your posts, and get them to send out your link in social media channels, you have successfully reached a new group of potential customers.
We’ve established four reasons blogging is good for your business- expertise, SEO, rapport, and social media. In future posts, I will explore each of these topics in more detail. So, bookmark this page, tweet it to your followers, and add our RSS feed to your reader so you can come back for more insights. If you’re already convinced that blogging can help your business, give us a call and we’ll see if we’re a good fit for helping your business achieve its online marketing goals.
{ 2 trackbacks }