The short answer, no. Though blogging has rapidly changed over the years, it has not lost its value for business owners and marketers alike. Let's move on to why you should use blogging as a marketing tactic.
It Helps Drive Traffic to Your Website
Like many of us, you want more visitors to your website, so how do you do that through blogging?
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?
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. We'll get into more of the benefits of blogging on your SEO a bit later, but it's also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what new content to surface.
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.
So, the first benefit of blogging? It helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that.
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.
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.
It Drives Long-term Results.
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.
When it comes to blogging, most of your sales will likely come from your older posts.
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.
Blogging is Not Dead
If you're looking to start a business blog or get more investment for one you've already started, the reasons above are a great place to start arguing your case.
Are you already well underway when it comes to business blogging? Just starting out? The team at Good Commerce is here to help answer any questions you may have, and can provide you with services to up level your business further!