4 Reasons Why Blogging is Important For Your Business Right Now and in the Future

by Kim Garmon Hummel

The internet is a big place. There are a lot of websites out there trying to capture and keep the attention of their intended audience. Have you ever searched for a specific topic only to find search results full of blogs around the exact topic you’re searching for? I know I have.

I love playing video games, but sometimes I’ll reach a snag. I turn to Google to find that others are dealing with the same problem and found a solution! It’s a collaborative process telling myself, and many others, we understand you have a problem to solve. We’re here to help.

That’s the power of a strong and effective blog for your business.

Blogging isn’t due diligence; it’s a long-term investment in your business’s authority and sales funnel. Here’s a quick overview of how:

Drive organic traffic to your website through keyword optimization, proper formatting, and content strategy.
Use blogs as a content baseline for social content, newsletters, and website copy. Repurposing content that speaks to the right audience isn’t laziness, it’s the key to optimizing time to value.
An active blog presence, answering the questions of your key audience, establishes your business as a guiding authority in your industry.
Proper strategy and optimization lead to more leads. Because you put the time and effort into a proper blog strategy before writing, you’ll rank higher than the competition (more on that later).

A blog is an opportunity. It’s a driver for sustainable growth. Hard work with a blog today yields stronger leads and reach in the future! In this blog, we’ll expand on how necessary blogging is for business in 2022 and beyond.

1. A blog drives traffic to your website

Every post on your blog is a destination for people to discover, travel to, and engage. Think about this from the point of view of a sales funnel. Blogs generate awareness of your business, its services, and how it can guide the reader through their problem. The name of the game is traffic, and blogs deliver.

Take this blog as an example. You’re here because you want to learn more about blog writing and strategy. More importantly, you want to know how it works. As I mentioned before in this blog, you are not alone in your skepticism. Blogs are for people like you that need some help or wish to learn more. Not everyone reading is a hot, toasty lead to sell to. And that’s great! No matter what, a blog leads to positive results. Here are a two reasons why:

There’s no shortage of competition. Blogs generate awareness that your business exists and is the right solution for your key audience over the other options (i.e. your competitors).
Even if a blog engagement fails to result in a direct lead, sales call, or demo, it establishes the idea that your company is an authority. That’s difficult to do without a blog!

Writing about what matters most to your audience drives traffic to your website. Plain and simple.

2. Repurpose blog content for social media

A share button is a powerful tool that generates clicks. And if you’re lucky, sustainable virality.

Blogs are content your audience, and yourself, can share freely. And more importantly, your blog is content that can be repurposed for endless social content. Here are three ways how:

Utilize keywords, phrases in your blog content to generate organic discovery and conversation on social. You’ve already completed an effective blog strategy. It’s time to leverage that effort for your social presence!
Questions and polls are a direct way to engage. Reframing your blog content as questions leads to ongoing discussion and reach.
Don’t do the same job twice. The content you’re writing in a blog is just as relevant to your audience as the content you share on social. So, grab an excerpt from a blog or two, adapt it for social media, and presto!

Lean into efforts that save you time and money. Repurposing your blog content for social media is a great way to save on both while maintaining value for your audience and business.

3. Establish trust and authority

The internet is a vital resource for just about every touchpoint in today’s world. Even if your business generates revenue solely through word of mouth or referrals, a dedicated web presence is essential.

Think about it: your business is successful but doesn’t exist on a Google search. Sure, there’s an address and phone number. But no reviews, no content, and no details about your services. There is nothing communicating to that prospective customer that you’re the right choice to solve their problem.

Now, look at your competitor. Same industry, similar services. Maybe you even do better work than they do! But that’s not what’s important here. The difference here is that your competitor has an established and consistent internet presence. Consistent content, a strong website with essential information, and a functional digital sales funnel. Their website is a constant source of lead generation. All of that hard work you need to focus on to generate business is done passively by your competitors.

You can take advantage of that passive lead generation right now. There are many pieces to the puzzle! Blogging is one of the most important parts of the whole picture. Without a dedicated internet presence and consistent content, your business fails to effectively communicate authority and establish trust.

4. Short-term investment, long-term results

Developing a content plan, with a dedicated blog strategy and keyword research, is a short-term investment that yields long-term results.

Blogs are not about immediate results. Yes, they can be used to generate discussion, boost awareness, and establish authority. But that doesn’t always happen overnight. It takes time to organically nurture and grow blog readership! That’s a big component of a blog strategy: are people searching for this keyword or topic? If nobody’s searching for the topics you’re writing about, search engines won’t direct readers to your content.

Now that your post is published and for the world to find, it will begin to rank on search engines. Ranking, simply put, is the search engine scrubbing your blog content to determine the content, structure, and readability. If the search engine determines your content is easy to read and relevant, you’ll rank higher than the competition. Influencing that process is tough, but here are three ways you can:

Keyword optimization: Use relevant keywords discovered through research in your blog headlines and copy.
Heading and font sizes: structure your content for your audience and the algorithm.
Backlinks: Does your blog link to other relevant content that keeps visitors using the search engine? A big part of optimizing your content includes leveraging the needs of the search engine (increased usage time) with the needs of your consumer (relevant content that they want to keep reading).

Historical optimization

Your content needs to stay relevant. Repurpose and update your older content to align with updated research, strategy, and optimization best practices. This is the “work smarter, not harder” part of blogging. It doesn’t matter if it’s posted last year or five years ago. Keep it fresh and engaging.

Vanity metrics

An area that people commonly confuse is vanity metrics. These are the metrics that look good on paper but don’t have a significant impact on your bottom line. Say your blog post earns over 40,000 impressions. That’s awesome! But if the visitor’s only on the blog page for seven seconds on average, how valuable is that impression? It’s easy to twist basic metrics in your favor. Don’t. Instead of championing high numbers, investigate! Look deeper into content results, like reading time, visitor origin, or whether or not the visitor engaged with other content in the blog or website.

A better blog begins with strategy. Work with Sauce Agency to develop a content strategy that works

Blogging is more than just sitting down and writing what you like and know. It begins with dedicated, replicable strategy work through keywords, testing, and optimization. Here at Sauce, we work with you to develop a Recipe for Results, a comprehensive strategy that includes everything from a SWOT analysis to a content plan. In order to know where to go, you first need data. We know you want to grow. A blog helps you reach that goal. So do we!

Contact one of our Growth Guides today to discover a better way to blog and grow smarter.