The difference between a successful company and their less effective competitors usually comes down to marketing. Companies that can acquire new opportunities in a scaleable, affordable way, thrive. Those that can’t attract enough opportunities, eventually disappear.
In this article we’ll look at why successful companies so often invest in their company blog. And how good blogging habits can significantly contribute to your company’s long term success.
Monster ROI
If you create your blog articles in-house then your primary cost is time. A quality external writer will cost you between R2000 & R5000 per article.
So what do you get for your investment?
Well, new websites typically don’t attract much love from Google. So at the start you get nothing but the sweet sound of crickets. And it feels like you’ve wasted your time or money.
But that changes over time.
As your site improves in search rankings, the value of your content skyrockets. Imagine you have 20 articles that each attract 15 visitors per month. From those 3600 visits a year you could get 60 - 200 sales leads, or more. That’s a lot of potential business!
And the best part is, you only created the articles once. But your efforts generate new leads month after month.
This also means your average cost per lead tends to decrease over time. And companies that have low customer acquisition costs tend to thrive in the long term.
Your Marketing Backbone
The articles you create for your website become the framework for your entire marketing strategy. The more valuable articles you create, the more marketing options your company has.
Take social media as an example. A decade ago content marketing and social marketing were considered distinct. These days it’s difficult to imagine one without the other. There are literally 100’s of marketing tools to help you distribute your content. And the more quality content you have, the more you can contribute to the conversation on social. Articles are an excellent way to remind your loose social connections how you can add value to their business.
Every business has leads that looked promising, but ultimately didn’t convert. The more of these high potential leads you have, the more future revenue you are sitting on. Creating articles for your site will give you a recurring reason to keep in touch with this pot of gold. Just put your prospects into a mailing list and share your articles when they get published. And your prospects will get regular reminders why they contacted you in the first place.
Your content can even support other marketing initiatives, like working with a lead generation services provider. They can distribute your best content to your best prospects. It’s a great way to develop new opportunities.
Finally, blog articles can be repurposed into other forms of valuable content. Were you asked to present at a conference? Congratulations, you’re already prepared. Just take the points from an article and pop them into a presentation tool. Want to make a video? Your articles are full of talking points that your viewers will love.
Authority
These days, buyers do considerable research before they contact the companies they are considering to hire. They want to know what kind of company they are potentially dealing with before they make contact.
Informative, well written articles give you a chance to showcase your knowledge and expertise. When visitors see you are clearly an expert in your field, they’ll be more likely to connect. So sharing your knowledge just makes sense.
You can also use your blog to highlight areas where you differentiate yourselves from your competitors.
Helpful articles also give your site visitors strong reasons to remain on your site. It takes several minutes to read a long article. And visitors may find themselves navigating to other parts of your website, too. The more time a visitor spends on your website, the more likely they are to become a lead.
Topical Associations
Google’s algorithm is smart. Really smart. It can process the words on your website and match them to people’s search queries. Incredible, right!
But Google needs multiple points of reference to get a perfect match. If your website doesn’t have a lot of content, Google may not have enough information to understand your website. When that happens the algorithm doesn’t know what queries best match your site content.
The easiest way to help Google, is to write articles on your site around a single topic. By focusing your articles around a single theme, Google can associate your entire site with that topic.
But ultimately, search isn’t about algorithms - it’s about people! When you create articles on a recurring topic you are telling your site visitors what you are all about. And having lots of strong articles on a single topic automatically confers the authority you need to acquire leads.
Indexable Content
Indexed content refers to content on your website that can be found via a search engine.
As you might expect, the more words there are on your website, the more words that can be found on Google.
Why is this important?
For a searcher to find your website Google needs to connect the searcher’s query with your website. And there’s a far better chance of this happening if you have lots of related search terms on your site.
Consider this query
“what to look for in a web design company”
There is a very good chance that the searcher will hire a web design company in the near future. But for now they are trying to figure out how to hire an agency. If you’re a web designer then you definitely WANT this searcher to visit your site. The best way to get them to your site is to provide a detailed article that answers their exact question.
Internal Linking Opportunities
An internal link is a hyperlink that sends a visitor from one page on your site to another. For example, your blog article on French desserts might link to a separate article on after dinner digestif drinks in a different article on the same website.
Having articles on your website means you can more easily create internal links to other pages on your site. This is important for several reasons. Among them:
- You can direct visitors to the page(s) you most want them to visit. If someone visits your blog article, you can link to other pages on your site that are more commercial in nature. If the visitor is interested they’ll check out your other pages and possibly take action.
- You can teach Google what your important pages are about. Google follows links on your website from one page to another. In doing so, it associates the hyperlink text for each link with the page the link is pointing to. Say you have 3 blog pages all pointing to the same page on your website. The first link uses the text “purebred dalmatian puppies in Johannesburg.” The second link says, “dalmatian puppies for sale in Johannesburg.” And the third link says, “purebred dalmatians.”
Pretty soon Google is going to understand that this page is important. Otherwise you wouldn’t have linked to it on 3 separate occasions. And from the context of the links Google will be able to easily understand the target page is all about purebred dalmatian puppies for sale in Johannesburg.
Worth The Effort
It’s easy to see the value of an active blog. But if you’re thinking you don’t have time to write, think again! It only takes 20 minutes a day to create a few strong articles every month. You owe it to your company’s long term success to start investing in your blog today.
