The Power of the Blog

Blogging doesn’t necessarily come naturally to many of us. Quite a few of us don’t really understand it, don’t see the point of carving out two to three hours out of our busy schedules to write a piece of content that may or may not be read. And even if a few people end up reading it? Then what?

The fact is, few individuals see the value of blogging in a day and age bound by 140 characters. With our ever-decreasing attention spans, it may not make much sense for brands to use this long-form of marketing. After all, why would someone want to read an 800- or 1000-word piece when they can just read a tweet and “get the gist” of the argument?

Good question.

What makes blogging a powerful communication and marketing tool is that if you’re a good writer, who’s able to grab a reader’s attention by using a catchy headline, and a compelling image, you may very well attract many eyes to your piece. That means more readers for a longer time, where you’re able to communicate the value of what you do, get into the finer details of your business, highlight your USP, and close the sale that way.

We see blogging as a one-on-one meeting with the reader, where you can talk freely, not bound by a time- or character-limit. This is typically the perfect time to introduce your readers to “hidden”, not-so-obvious aspects of your product or service; something that’s not necessarily apparent upon visiting your brand’s website.

Still Not Sold?

For those of us who are “allergic” to writing. Here are a few more compelling reasons to invest in a blog.

1) It helps drive traffic to your website. Think about the ways people find your website:

They could type your name right in to their browser, but that's an audience you already have. They know who you are, you're on their radar, and that doesn't help you get more traffic on top of what you're already getting.

You could pay for traffic by placing tons of paid ads, which isn't illegal, but still quite expensive. And the second you run out of money, your traffic stops coming, too.

So, how can you drive any traffic? In short: blogging, social media, and search engines. Here's how it works.

Think about how many pages there are on your website. Probably not a ton, right? And think about how often you update those pages. Probably not that often, right? (How often can you really update your About Us page, you know?)

Well, blogging helps solve both of those problems.

Every time you write a blog post, it's one more indexed page on your website, which means it's one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in organic search.

Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you're creating content that people can share on social networks -- Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest -- which helps expose your business to a new audience that may not know you yet.

Blog content also helps keep your social media presence going -- instead of asking your social media manager to come up with brand new original content for social media (or creating that content yourself), your blog can serve as that repository of content. You're strengthening your social reach with blog content and driving new website visitors to your blog via your social channels. Quite a symbiotic relationship, if I do say so myself.

2) It helps convert that traffic into leads. Now that you have traffic coming to your website through your blog, you have an opportunity to convert that traffic into leads.

Just like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads. The way this works is really simple: Just add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post.

Often, these calls-to-action lead to things like free ebooks, free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials ... basically, any content asset for which someone would be willing to exchange their information.

3) It helps establish authority. The best business blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have. If you're consistently creating content that's helpful for your target customer, it'll help establish you as an authority in their eyes. This is a particularly handy tool for Sales and Service professionals.

Can you imagine the impact of sending an educational blog post you wrote to clear things up for a confused customer? Or how many more deals a salesperson could close if their leads discovered blog content written by their salesperson?

"Establishing authority" is a fluffy metric -- certainly not as concrete as traffic and leads, but it's pretty powerful stuff. And if you need to tie the impact of blogging to a less fluffy metric, consider measuring it the same way you measure sales enablement. Because at the end of the day, that's what many of your blog posts are.

4) It drives long-term results. You know what would be cool? If any of the following things helped you drive site traffic and generate new leads:

Trip to Hawaii

Going to the gym

Sleeping

Good news, though! That's what blogging does -- largely through search engines. Here's what I mean:

Let's say you sit down for an hour and write and publish a blog post today. Let's say that blog post gets you 100 views and 10 leads. You get another 50 views and 5 leads tomorrow as a few more people find it on social media and some of your subscribers get caught up on their email and RSS. But after a couple days, most of the fanfare from that post dies down and you've netted 150 views and 15 leads.

It's not done.

That blog post is now ranking in search engines. That means for days, weeks, months, and years to come, you can continue to get traffic and leads from that blog post.

So while you're hitting your snooze alarm, surfing in Hawaii, and pumping iron, you're also driving traffic and leads. The effort you put in yesterday can turn into hundreds of thousands of views and leads in the future.

In fact, about 70% of the traffic each month on this very blog comes from posts that weren't published in the current month. They come from old posts. Same goes for the leads generated in a current month -- about 90% of the leads we generate every month come from blog posts that were published in previous months. Sometimes years ago.

We call these types of blog posts "compounding" posts. Not every blog post will fit into this category, but the more evergreen blog posts you write, the more likely it is that you'll land on one of those compounding blog posts. In our own research, we've found that about 1 in every 10 blog posts end up being compounding blog posts.

Pretty interesting stuff right? As an old-time blogger myself, I never really thought blogging could be this powerful. Blogging is a lot like planting a seed, watering it, and sitting back (and relaxing) knowing that one day, your blog will bear fruit and bring you those much-coveted leads you’re looking for.

So what are you waiting for? Start blogging today!