The depths of people’s investigative and explorative nature, whether they know it or not, are vastly expansive. Overall intake of information in all ways shapes and forms is comprised of reading dense, voluminous literature ranging from anywhere in the way of technical discourses to informal directional help forums. The already large array of educational material that is out there has now been magnified with the amount of accessible readable content that is available online, and has optimized the attainment of furthering knowledge like never before. A particularly keen concept bearing contributing to the digital information movement taking place is the recent uproar of online blogging.
While blogging channels have caught the attention of the avid information seeker for the sake of personal growth, there is a concurrent attention on today’s blogging trends coming from a different style internet user. Business owners, entrepreneurs, corporate executives and all who orient themselves with progressing commerce are seeing blogging popularity as an opportunity to act in favor of that orientation to which they adhere. E-commerce has flourished upon implementation of this written content feature and to have such a feature has morphed into a standard for business viability online. So here goes…A blog about blogging (insert Inception “BWOOONG”).
(Essay.com)
As commerce shifts to the digital realm, questions will naturally follow suit with those advancements regarding their utility in propelling business beyond the capabilities of its current position and features. So if you’re wondering if blogging will do you and your business any service, the answer is simply YES! As a marketing tool, regular blog posting and upkeep has been noted to be of great value in the scope of e-commerce. In support of blogs’ utility, 81% of marketers deemed their useful or better, 34% of whom found it to be important, and 25% stating blogs as critical to their operations (HubSpot). Beyond the marketer-majority claim that blogging will prove beneficial to the growth of your marketing plan and your business entirely, examining the practices of the most successful business endeavors will bear similar insight that the blog has become key. Blog related habits of Fortune 500 companies are depicted as having intensified in the recent years, with 23% of Fortune 500 companies boasting public blogs in 2010 and an increase to 36% in 2016 (Statista). As the number of marketing experts and successful business mavens employing blogging into their online practice, any question of its use should subside, as it is apparently something worthy of inclusion into any business model in this digital age.
So, how are blogs useful to businesses, exactly? Let’s start with a quick flash from the past, to when we’ve discussed what is important for businesses to compete online, and we’ll start it from the assumed condition that one is just starting with a blog, has no followers for that blog, and possibly doesn’t have many followers for their website as well. Maintaining a blog comes with the territory of wanting to ensure that that blog is presentable and upholds a standard of what is expected of it. This entails written words, images, links, and other insulative content that reinforces the information that your blog is attempting to convey. In the Venn Diagram connecting your blog’s content and the general means for achieving good SEO, you’ll find that all of these elements align in the middle.
(WaveUC.com)
Essentially, everything that is used in generating a blog, when applied just right, can and will prove advantageous to you in search engine rankings. In regards to the written content of your blog, developing a title for each blog or blog series that encapsulates your market or just the driving theme of that blog or series is key, as well as incorporating those thematic devices early on and often into the body of your written work (Amy Porterfield). Through use of recurring themed keywords, search engines will eat your blog right up and tell internet searchers all about you! As mentioned in previous Rave Retailer blogs, the use of images or videos with proper transcription can generate SEO traffic to your page. For this reason, make sure that written correspondence is given to all non-written items on your page, whether visibly or in the backend embedding, to ensure that search engines pick them up as well (Rave Retailer (SEO blog, hyperlink it***)). As a final note so as to optimize your visibility for search engines, you will want to make your blog visible through your website. In doing this, people with intentions to merely blog will, either purposefully or inadvertently, find their way onto your website, gaining you traffic, which is always the first step to gain a follower or gaining a sale, it is all about that traffic, my any means necessary (Amy Porterfield). Long story short, to make your blog work for your business, you have to make SEO work for your blog.
While the technical aspect of blogging will no doubt be useful, for optimizing the traffic that is driven into your website via your blog, there is also certainly something to show for the mere fact that people enjoy information collection as their own personal endeavor. As aforementioned in this blog, people love to be able to access so much great food for thought now that the world wide web has become such a breeding ground for new insights on familiar topics and fresh fields for investigating all together. As people are making their rounds, perusing all of the blog content that is available online, you want your blog to appeal and engage them in your field, all while tackling some key approach elements to ensure your best execution. Eight motivations for blog accessing are depicted by Experiment.com (Convenient Information Seeking, Inquiry and Education, Fact-Checking Distrust of Media, Opinion Seeking, Blog Ambiance, Expression and Affiliation, Guidance, and Personal Fulfillment), to be able to address these different motivations, you will be able to trigger the desires of readers, captivating your audience and establishing a blogger-reader relationship (Experiment). This could manifest itself as loyalty to your blog and a recurring reader base.
As a blog gains momentum, you will find that your means of increasing attention to your business will be able to account a new method of traffic signalling towards you: shareable use of your blog and word-of-mouth. On the internet, when someone finds something to be enticing or applicable, they have the connectivity platforms necessary to quickly pass this information onto whomever they know will find potential value in the information that the blog conveys. This can reach to great lengths and bounds and will attract new attention to your blog. Furthermore, however, it will do wonders for your sales lead generating. In a research study comprised of a 66% sample of companies with blogs, it was shown that those blog-integrated companies provoked 67% more leads than the companies that were without blog use (Traffic Generation Cafe). Blogging, for all intents and purposes, acts as a magnet for your website, soaking up anyone who is searching within the parameters of your market’s characteristics. And if you think the leads will stop or plateau from there, think again. The more you blog, the more potential for traffic you gain, and that means continued growth of lead opportunities. As you achieve the 24-51 blog entry range, you can expect to see those leads increase to 77% over that of the low-entry count blog users, and widening your lead against those without a blog at all significantly (Traffic Generation Cafe)! So if ROI regarding the time you spend blogging is a question in mind, it is apparently worth the effort on the blog.
(HypeBot.com)
Ultimately, to not incorporate a blog into your online presence will only be detrimental to your e-commerce performance. The goal to keep in mind is to NOT not blog. This is not as straightforward as it sounds, and it is in fact dual pronged in its nature. What this means is: one, you have to actually blog to begin with. To have a business model with a website and not integrate a blog means to lose opportunities to excel, which is not desirable. And two, you have to be consistent in your blogging. To haphazardly post a blog entry here and a blog entry there will throw people off, it is inconsistent, and it will forfeit your chance to have you blogs compound visits for you. Most of your traffic is not gained by your here-and-now posting, but it is in numbers. The more you post and the more consistently, the most visitors you will see on your website. In a given month, it was found that roughly 70% of traffic was generated by posts previous to a current month and that around 90% of leads generated in a month were generated by previous posts as well (HubSpot). Think of each blog as a doorway into your website, the more blogs based on varying topics corresponding with more keyword searches, the more doorways to your website.
In conclusion, to blog is to have yet another leg up in the world of e-commerce. To have it is to have a fighting chance and the lack it is to miss out on opportunities for your business’s continued progress. With the means to fire flare signals for the attention of search engine results pages and the appeal of information into which people may delve, blogging is a useful tool all around for business in this day and age. To make the move towards integrating blogging into your business’s website, contact Rave Retailer today and watch how the information-seeking habits of the digital world can benefit your business!