Blogs are trending. You see them popping up everywhere and a lot of people follow one or more blogs nowadays. Sharing your stories, knowledge and ideas has never been easier and we see a lot of companies diving in as well. But as always, the question for every business is: What do I actually gain from having a blog?
Our experience
We have said it before; fresh, unique, and interesting content is the key to SEO. Blogging is a perfect way of creating new content on a regular basis and if you do it right the results are amazing. Since we started blogging on a regular basis, we have seen our website visitors increase by almost 150%. This isn’t just from people reading blog articles and leaving the website again. We also saw a big increase in people visiting the homepage.
Attracting the right audience
The biggest challenge is to attract the right audience to your blog, since you want it to be the same as your company’s target group. If people are coming to your blog to read about books and you sell jewellery, then you are doing something wrong. Try to get a clear understanding of what your target group is interested in and write about that.
Increasing sales by blogging
You might just want to blog because you enjoy it, but usually the final goal of a corporate blog is to increase sales. So how do you do that?
1. Prove your knowledge
By sharing your knowledge on your blog, you prove that you are the expert when it comes to the product you offer. By showing that you know what you are talking about, people will trust you more and will therefore be more likely to buy your product.
2. Call to action
Try to make sure people don’t just leave the website after they have read the article. Place a ‘call to action’ next to or at the end of your article to try to persuade the reader into staying on your website a little longer, e.g. you could add a link to check out your product page. If your blog article has anything to do with the product you offer (which it should), it shouldn’t be too difficult to refer the reader to it.
3. Easy navigation
Make sure it is easy to navigate to other key pages on your website from your blog. If it takes too much effort to get somewhere, you can be sure that people won’t go there. That means that you will miss out on opportunities.
Be passionate about it or don’t do it
Our final advice: If you or the person you have delegated to create the blog are not passionate about blogging, then find someone who is or just don’t do it. A blog with uninspiring content once every couple of months won’t do anyone any good.