Most businesses today have an online blog, however not all businesses update it on a regular basis. If you aren’t creating new, valuable, and interesting content on your website, you give visitors few reasons to return – and adding to your blog is the easiest way to do this.
It is important to regularly, and as objectively as possible, assess whether your blog is adding value to your business. Let’s look at a few questions you should answer to get a better idea of this:
Are You Able To Connect With Customers?
Companies and businesses set up brand blogs to connect with their customers at a personal level. This helps businesses build trust and credibility, and foster brand recognition and loyalty among readers. If you have been able to establish a connection with your target audience and gained their trust, blogging and sharing on social media is likely working well for you.
Has Your Web Traffic Increased?
One of the main purposes of setting up a blog is to help drive targeted traffic to your website. Increased traffic means you have been able to grow your online footprint and attract an online audience. When you then engage with those visitors, by delivering the type of information they seek, it will create more leads for you, and add more value to your business.
Has Your Revenue Increased?
Perhaps the most obvious way to learn whether blogging has added value to your business is to see the impact it has had on your revenue. Generally, it takes time to build an audience but if you have a successful content marketing strategy, it should only take 4-6 months to notice a difference in your email enquiries>phone calls>sales.
Why Is Blogging Not Working Out For You?
If it has been a couple of months and you still have not noticed any change in visitors to your site or enquiries, then you need to re-think your strategy. While setting up a blog is easy. managing it is often not so easy. If you find your writing isn’t the best, or you are having trouble finding topics to write about, then hiring a content writer is probably a good idea.
A good writer will plan the creation of topics over a period of time to cover all of your key business areas. It is important to not treat content creation as a one-off effort, but rather as an investment over a period of months. Even if it is 2-3 blog posts per month, you will see a difference over time.
While it is important to write for human audiences, it is worth considering what the search engines, like Google, expect from your blog as well. It needs to have original (certainly not copied) information, which is relevant to your website’s area of business. Google likes websites to be updated constantly – demonstrating that they are delivering current information – so use your blog for this purpose too.
Skilled writers who know how to write for the web understand this, especially those with an knowledge of the search engines.
Don’t Be Boriiiiing!
Whenever appropriate, try to tell stories in your blog posts, and elaborate on key points. A blog that is a series of company announcements is boring – and it does nothing to solve the problems of readers (the main reason they are on your website). If anything these types of posts are self-indulgent, focusing on your business rather than how your business can solve your clients’/customers’/prospects’ problems.
Those who are consistent, and are able to please their website visitors, with already know how their blog definitely adds value to their businesses.
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