How can blogging help my business?

We often get asked about blogging – usually by customers of ours who have heard that blogging is important, but have very little idea why, or in many cases what blogging means.

A Blog (short for Weblog) – is nothing more than an online diary, a platform on which you, the blogger can write views, opinions, (or pretty much anything you like really) so that should someone be looking for your content, they may find it and have a good old read of it.

There are loads of free blogging platforms out there which will allow you to set up your own blog and start blogging right away. Popular ones include WordPress, Blogger, Squidoo and loads of others.

So whilst it may be easy to set up your own blog and start blogging about subjects that interest you – the question still exists “How can blogging help my business?”…

It is fairly common knowledge these days that the internet is a great source of lead generation – you may already have a website that is well optimised for a handful of key phrases which deliver a steady flow of targeted prospects to you. Great! – but how many other search terms or phrases are there that may also be relevant to your business, and would help drive more traffic and increase enquiries? The answer to that one is THOUSANDS!

This is where blogging comes in…

Take our website for example – www.pumpkinwebdesign.co – Our website is well optimised for key terms such as “web design in Preston”, “web designers Preston”,”website design preston”, that kind of thing. This is great as it means that we can keep the written content of our website specific to what we do and where we do it, meaning that our web content makes sense to the visitor, no one gets confused and we get phone calls!

But what about the countless other search terms that get entered into Google everyday that we could take advantage of, such as…

“should I have a Facebook page for my business?”

“how to get my website noticed”

“websites for tradesmen”

These are typical questions that might be asked of Google by our potential customers and blogging gives us a method of answering these questions with a well written article, driving traffic to our website and increasing sales.

Try it yourself – run a search on Google for any of the questions above and look for www.pumpkinwebdesign.co/(article-name)…and this should give you an idea on how blogging can help your business by driving traffic and increasing your turnover.

There’s a nifty little trick that we like to take advantage of which is to go to Google, start asking a question that you think may be asked regularly in your industry, if Google completes the question for you before you finish typing it, then its probably a question that gets asked of Google quite a bit, and you should consider answering it via your blog, with a view to driving traffic to your business.

For example – for this blog post we jumped onto Google and began typing “how can blogging…” – and Google completed the question “how can blogging help my business”.

So assuming that this is a question getting asked a lot – we’ve created this blog post titled: “how can blogging help my business?”, written some good content in answer to the question, and published it.

Depending on when you’re reading this, you might want to test the theory? Save us to your favourites, then go back to Google and search the question. Assuming we’ve written some good content in answer to the question – you’ll probably find our article on the first page of Google right now.

So now that you understand the art of blogging, be sure to take it a step further by ensuring that your blog post and pages has a good call to action – there’s no point driving significant levels of traffic to your website if your not going to encourage the visitor to take the next step.