Blogging can expose your business to new audiences—and new customers.


You likely learned about experiments using rats and mazes in your elementary science classes. The concept is simple: How quickly would a hungry rat complete the maze to reach a food reward at the end? These maze experiments studied the rats’ learning and memory.

Your business or brand probably won’t offer readers food, but you want to teach them to visit your small business blog and consume their reward in the form of your content and expertise. A blog is a vital part of your business’s content marketing plan. It is where you can find customers old and new, supply them with the information they crave, and establish your business as a thought leader and resource center for your industry.

 


If done correctly, your customers will navigate the labyrinthine that is the internet and land on your blog. The benefits of leading all these readers to your blog are many, but most important are what we’ll call The Big Three:

Driving Traffic to Your Website

 


A small business blog is one of the most important, and dare we say “easiest,” ways to attract visitors to your website. Once you’ve published your keyword-optimized blog post, you can use your traffic-driving content marketing tools to blast it out to the masses: social media, email newsletters, paid ads, and organic SEO.


A particularly attractive benefit of a blog is its impact on your SEO. A blog is considered an extension of your website. Each time you add a page/post, search engines index it, and it can be found more easily via organic search. Search engines show favor to lively and dynamic websites who are regularly updating their blog and pages. This sends a notice to search engine robots to come and “crawl” your website so it can be indexed and they can begin driving showing your content to relevant search queries.

Establishing Your Brand

 


To cultivate a loyal following, a base of people that will hopefully turn into customers, you must be able to solve their problems, teach them about topics important to them, and/or answer their questions. You can do all this through your blog.


You’ll have to conduct market research and have reliable buyer personas to ensure your small business blog ideas cover the topics your readers care about most. Consistently and successfully helping them will establish your business or brand as a trusted and reliable resource. Your followers will become loyal readers, sign up for your blog/email updates, and will be more likely to click that call-to-action button, which leads us to our next point.

Converting Traffic to Leads

 


Your small business blog can generate big results. It is one step, and likely the first step, in your readers’ journey. You want them to take the next step. You lead them to take the next step with prominent calls-to-action for your product, service, or special offer. Whether it is an e-book, a downloadable infographic, an educational webinar, or anything else that readers will give you their information to access.

After readers have given you their information, turn them over to your sales team and Voila! You have generated leads, and here’s the nice thing: Your blog never goes away. It can continue generating leads until you decide to unpublish it (and why would you do that?).

Ready to begin blogging?

 


Folio can help build your new website and set up your blog so you can start driving more traffic and leads to your business. Get started today.