Increasing revenue is a good thing. In just about any business when you’re increasing your revenues you’re helping not just yourself, but all those involved with the business. You’re helping customers by providing something they want. You’re helping employees, vendors, etc.
So those in business are almost always thinking about ways to increase revenues. Through sales. Through marketing. Through product improvement. All kinds of things.
One effort that can help your business grow is blogging.
Here are a few of the ways it can happen.
1. Individual Post SEO
Much of the focus in the blogging world goes to the search engine ranking of any individual post. And that is certainly a goal. In most cases you want your post to achieve a high ranking for a certain term or collection of terms. And when it does, the traffic can be wonderful.
I kind of compare it to a hit song on the radio. Sometimes you do some research and look at what people want. Then you create content to fit that want. And sometimes it works, people love it and then more and more people consume it.
Other times you may not necessarily do the initial research. Maybe you’ve been in the field for a long time. You kind of have a feel for what works and what doesn’t. But you’re still not sure so you create and share regularly and once in awhile you have a hit.
And the more hits you have the better…almost always.
The more traffic a single post brings the more eyeballs that are on you and your business. That often leads to more business in multiple ways. Someone might click through to your homepage and go through your sales process. They might download a lead generation item you included in the post and get on your email list. They may click right to a product or service you’re selling.
2. Brand SEO
One neat side benefit from regular blogging is that your brand improves in the SEO world. Let’s say you’re a plumber in your city. You start blogging. It’s one way for search engines, like Google, to learn more about you. It seems that one indicator they look for is traffic to your site and how often people are going to your site, what they’re doing there and how they seem to like your brand.
A blog can help prove to Google that your brand is worthy of higher rankings for sales-related terms. So if someone searches for a plumber in your city, your blog can help make it more likely that you show up first or at least very high up in the rankings.
Also, the more people that read your blog the more people that will know about you and your brand. And sometimes they won’t be in buying mode when they read an individual post, but weeks or months later they may be in the market. They often go to Google, type in your brand name, find your website and go.
3. Referral Traffic
Blogging is a great way to attract links to your site. Other bloggers can find your content and link to it. People will share it on social media, email, text and more. If you are writing great content people will find it and share it.
This all leads to referral traffic. Let’s say you create a post highlighting something you did. Another blogger in the industry likes it so they create a post and link to your post. Their post becomes popular or maybe gets high rankings so people read their post and many of those people click through to your post.
This can also affect SEO, but a big benefit is just the referral traffic.
4. Sharing
I just mentioned this a little bit, but it’s worth expanding upon. People will share your blog posts. Maybe not at first. Maybe not for a few months. It takes time to figure out what posts work for you and your industry. But if you stick with it you’ll find that some posts get shared in all kinds of different ways.
This brings in traffic to individual posts, but it even goes beyond that. As more people discover you and your brand it will lead to sharing to just your homepage. Or people will share just your brand name so others can search for it on Google or Facebook or whatever.
This is often an overlooked aspect of brand building and that includes in the blogging world.
5. Authority
Sometimes in the blogging world you see the phrase “thought leader” or something like that. It’s usually about being an authority as compared to your competition. There is always competition and you’re likely always trying to win the business of the same customers. You can win in a lot of ways.
One way is with authority. If, for example, a customer thinks that you have a little more knowledge of the industry they may be more willing to trust you with their business. One way to prove your authority in the industry is to share your knowledge via a blog.
A great way to do start doing that is to just answer the common questions you get with blog posts.
And it’s not always about the competition. It could be that one customer is trying to decide if they want to buy from your or hire you. So they do some research, which maybe includes reading reviews and possibly blog posts. If they like what they read they are probably more likely to buy.
Conclusion
You might be wondering how you can track this type of effect from blogging. You can track traffic. Both to individual posts and to your website overall. Obviously you probably have other things going on, but I like to see how things change over time. Kind of a “before blogging” and “after blogging” thing. Not just traffic, but on the whole business.
But blogging is not a quick thing. It’s like any other type of content marketing. It takes time. But that’s also an opportunity because those willing to stick it out see the results compared to those that bail.