Hopefully, in my last post, I convinced you that blogging is a great way to boost your traffic. Now that we’ve gotten to the why, it’s time to get to the how. I also want to make the case that quality and consistency are much more important than quantity.
Why Quality Beats Quantity
You could be churning out posts every single day, but if they aren’t very good or appealing to your customers you are probably doing more harm than good. According to a recent survey by Hubspot of over 7,000 businesses, B2B companies that blog 6-8 times per month get over 250% more traffic to their websites than B2B companies that don’t blog at all. In addition, B2B companies who blog only 1-2 times per month see a 70% increase in leads from their websites.
Let’s put that into context. When you are blogging for your business, even a couple of times a month, you could be making a huge impact on your bottom line. By focusing on creating the best content you possibly can, one or two times a week, you are adding a lot more value than if you force yourself to blog for the sake of blogging.
Quality Keeps People Coming Back
If you read any blogs on a regular basis, the quality of the content is probably pretty important to you. Otherwise, why else would you be reading? Not only will blogging help you to build more traffic through organic search, by creating great content you should also begin building a base of subscribers that will help you to promote that content. This will often lead to links back to your website, which will further boost your SEO.
Quality Gives You Authority
A well written blog post will both educate your prospect and promote your business as an authority in your area of expertise. By truly caring about the content that you are putting out on your blog, you also show your audience that you respect their time. The more helpful and educating content you can provide on your blog, the better the likelihood someone will come back to use your product or service when they need it.
Getting Started Blogging for Business
It can often be difficult to come up with blog topics. It can also take a while to build momentum on your blog. Here are a few steps that you can use to get started with blogging for business:
1. Make sure you set up your blog on your own domain, i.e. www.yourcompany.com/blog or blog.yourcompany.com.
2. Come up with a list of keywords that is related to your company and industry. Write 10-15 headlines for blog posts based on this list.
3. Work on writing 1-2 posts a week based on your list or headlines.
4. Focus on writing quality posts of 500 words or more.
5. Be consistent. Writing one post a week is better than writing 4 posts one week and none for the rest of the month. Check out our article on the importance of consistency in digital marketing.
It is important to understand that blogging takes time to build up an audience and increase your traffic. It is a long term strategy and not a quick fix. While you could get more traffic immediately using Google Adwords, it is more beneficial to build up organic traffic. Adwords will always cost you money, whereas organic traffic requires only the initial time invested to produce your posts. More content on your website relating to your business will also increase the likelihood that you get found by prospective customers. It only takes a couple of months to start seeing some serious results.