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CM 101: 5 Reasons to Start Blogging

October 31, 2016 By Rachael Crowley

CM 101: 5 Reasons to Start Blogging

And Tips on How You Can Get Started

Imagine having repeat visitors come to your website every week. Better yet, what if those repeat visitors trusted you? What if they saw the value of your company? What if they converted on your offers and shared your content?

That’s the power of blogging and content marketing.

Blogging regularly can help increase website traffic, build trust with your audience, and position you as a real thought leader in your space.

5 Ways Blogging Will Help Your Company

Boost Search Engine Rankings

Blogging can boost your search engine rankings if you do two things consistently:

  1. Write truly helpful, relevant content, and
  2. Optimize your blog posts with keywords

How does this work? Google wants to give users the most useful information pertaining to their search. When you publish content that is optimized for the search term and helpful to the user, your search ranking gets a boost. When readers show the content is helpful by sharing it, and when your content gets more visits, your blog gets an even bigger boost because people are finding your website relevant!

Regular blogging also helps build backlinks to your site. Backlinks are links to your website from a third party website. So when other bloggers link to your content because it is valuable, your page is rewarded with SEO points. You can learn more about the basics of SEO here.

Express Your Company’s Culture

Your blog doesn't need to be all business all of the time. Use your blog as a space to highlight the people and activities that make your company unique.

Sharing stories about your team members, the fundraising walk you did as an office, or company awards gives a valuable glimpse into who you are as an organization.

At the end of the day, people are looking to do business with people they trust. Blogging about best practices alongside stories about what makes your business special will help build a more personal trust with your audience.

B2B Blogging About Company Culture

Buffer provides social media tools for companies, but their blog often highlights and discusses their transparent culture.

Improve Your Social Media Presence

Blogging will provide you with ample material for social media posts and sharing. While most of your social presence should be sharing other people’s content, blogging gives you the resources to promote your own material. Readers will begin to recognize you as a voice of reason and knowledge in the industry.

Establish Yourself As a Thought-Leader

When you share valuable content to a targeted audience, your audience will pay attention. Blogging regularly can establish your company as a thought-leader among your target audience. Not only are you providing valuable information, you are sharing your unique voice and value proposition with your audience.

Capture More Leads

Reasons one through four above are about increasing traffic and the time visitors spend on your website.

But you want more than traffic to your blog—you want leads!

Reasons one through four above are also about how blogging builds trust. Trust is important because trusting blog visitors are more likely to convert by downloading your whitepaper or signing up for your newsletter.

That's why it is important to always include an offer within each blog post. Learn how you can maximize lead generation on your B2B blog here.

Lead Capture Form in B2B Blog

Hubspot has a field at the end of the blog post for the reader to enter their email and subscribe to their newsletter

Blogging is an Inexpensive Way to Climb Up the Search Engine Ranks

While blogging is a significant time investment, it is a relatively inexpensive way for your website to grow its organic traffic. With blogging, you don’t have to pay per click or per impression. If you write a great article, you could get a thousand visitors!

How your Company can Get Started with Blogging

For many companies, blogging is a good jumping off point for a B2B content marketing strategy. As we said before, blogging is a big time commitment, but there a few ways to make it more manageable.

First, set clear assignments and expectations. When you start blogging, make sure your team is on the same page with who is going to be writing what, how frequently you will write, and what you will write about. This will help make the blogging load more manageable. Blogging burnout is real and something that you need to consider before you dive in. Spreading the work over a few team members and developing “power partners” to share in guest posting are both ways to address this.

How do you know what to write about?

Remember, your blog should be providing valuable content for your target audience. The simplest form of blogging is writing informational articles.

For example, if your company offers IT services for businesses, then you should be writing about IT related topics potential buyers would find interesting. You could write about the phishing schemes, variable IT costs, or other concerns businesses have related to IT. You shouldn't write directly about your specific services. The point of the blog is to share your expertise.

Let customer questions be a source of inspiration.

One rule of thumb we like to follow is that if we're asked the same question twice, write about it on the blog. We love this practice because the work is practically done for us.

Anytime you find yourself explaining something in an email you know you have said before, transform that email into a blog post! You might also work together with your sales team or customer support to put together a list of questions they ask.

Blogging Best Practices

Make your posts easy to read

Readers skim posts until something gives them a reason to read deeper. Keep this in mind when you’re writing. Use subheadings that draw interest. Use visuals that make the reader curious. See our posts on writing for the web for more on how to create easily scannable content.

Use engaging images, not meaningless stock photos

Instead of an irrelevant stock photo, find an image that supports the points you’re making. The image should draw in the reader’s interest and provide added value to the post. A great strategy is to use screenshots or actual photos to really show the reader how to solve the problem that they’re having.

Write blog posts over 300 words…preferably over 1,000 words

This is a popular and much-debated topic out there in the content marketing world. We don’t know if an “ideal length” exists for readers, but we do know that posts should be 300 plus words for search engines. Many people say that longer is better while others say that readers don’t have a long enough attention span. Experiment with both to find what works for your audience.

Write headlines that promise value

Compel the reader to click on the article and make sure you deliver! Don’t use clickbait, but instead structure your headline so that the reader knows something valuable awaits them in your post!

Keep in mind what readers will be searching for

You want your headline to show that your post will answer a reader’s question. If you’re writing a post about repairing an obscure part on a printer, know that users might not know the name of that part. Instead of using the name of the part, write a headline about the problem a user is having that indicates that part might be broken.

Now, Start Your Blogging Calendar

If you are just getting started with blogging, your first step is to brainstorm a list of blog topics your personas will love. Download Bright Orange Thread's Editorial Calendar template to organize your blog topic queue. Then assign the posts and get writing!

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