20 Reasons Why Blogs Are A Must For Business.

20 Reasons Why Blogs Are A Must For Business.

1. A blog will help to rank your linked website faster because of the regular content you post.
2. Blogs help you establish yourself as an industry leader.
3. Blogs help create new opportunities.
4. Blogs help to build trust in client relationships.
5. Blog articles create backlinks that you can share on other sites and social media platforms.
6. Blogs can be added to your SEO link wheel to drive traffic from different directions.
7. Blogs are cheaper to host than normal websites.
8. You can create interlinks to previously published articles for reference.
9. Blogs let users comment on posts.
10. Content writers can contribute guest posts.
11. Blogs help to create email lists.
12. You can monetize your articles with affiliate links.
13. Blogs help to update information about your business.
14. Blogs help build brand awareness.
15. Long tail and targeted lead traffic can be improved.
16. Blogs are easy for getting social media exposure & new clients.
17. Blog posts can drive long-term results.
18. Blogging can help your brand work with influencers.
19. Blogging can help your brand increase customer engagement.
20. Companies that use blogs have 55% more visitors than websites.

Blogs and SEO Link Wheels.

I cannot stress enough the importance of Blogs and SEO Link Wheels!

If you think of it this way if you only have one site, you have only one source of traffic.

Yes, you can perform SEO, marketing, advertising, and social media optimization but if you have one brand you could expand using keywords related to your business (Brand Name +Keyword). 

To make your brand a household name you must do tonnes of advertising and marketing which can prove costly. Imagine having organic traffic for a fraction of the price. (I do not pay for advertising, and I have secured my global positioning, I am on the first page of Google for the search terms ‘UK Website Designers’ and ‘UK Domain Brokers’ plus many other keywords).

Having multiple blogs with exact match searchable keywords in your SEO Link Wheel is going to cost you less than traditional advertising.

Blogging helps your business grow in different ways. By having multiple blogs and adding them to your SEO Link Wheel you are essentially driving traffic from multiple directions.

Almost 4 billion people are connected to the internet worldwide, there is never a better time for companies to start blogging to enhance their lead generation strategies.

Blogging not only can help already established businesses it can also be the start of a side hustle and a second income for all of us.

You should always have a backup plan just in case something happens in your main job. You can theoretically start a business and generate work without the tedious journey of applying for second jobs and going to interviews. You can become your own boss. Imagine not having to answer to anyone, having to book days off, or traveling to work.

Earnings & Tax

If you are new to the game of blogging and you do start making money you must inform HMRC or the IRS that you are self-employed. Even if you buy and sell domain names you must let HMRC and the IRS know. In fact, if you buy and sell anything and do it on a regular basis you must declare your earnings. You will have to keep track of your revenue (your outgoings and income) and you will need to fill out a self-assessment form once a year.

Time

Blogging does not have to take a lot of time, it all depends on how fast you want to launch your site. Once you have done the SEO and have enough articles under your belt you can then post a couple of times a week.

A blog post a day still gives you time to work and play. 

If you are thinking of starting a side hustle, think of something you are truly passionate about, something that you feel you can share with the world, it could be a hobby or a craft.

You could also start a small business. A blog can be built around your interests. If you are not that good at writing invite guest bloggers to write on your site. Some guest bloggers will not charge and will simply be happy to get backlinks whilst others may charge a small fee.

Recent studies have shown that companies that prioritize blogging can expect 13 times more positive revenue.

“It is important to note that blogging doesn’t only benefit big businesses but also small companies and new start-ups”. 

Domain Names

Firstly, you need to choose a domain name for your blog. If you are an established business, choose a domain (brand name+ keyword).

If you are starting up choosing just your own personal name is all well and good, but if people have never heard of you, they are less likely to search for you or click on your blog. If anything, use (your name + keyword). I do have a blog that I call my online business card (www.renataentrepreneur.com) which I have shortened to (www.irenata.com) and the shorter version forwards to the default domain). I use this site to direct people to my portfolio.

Domain names play an important part in brand credibility.

If you are a start-up and have decided on starting a website rather than a blog this will be your brand name (the mothership as I call it or the default site) where you can then branch out with an SEO Link Wheel and add multiple blogs. If you are just starting out, you want to choose a domain that truly reflects your overall business focus.

SEO

It is fundamental you perform SEO because without it you will not get indexed and ranked by search engines. You need to use a strategy by incorporating keywords that describe your brand or company within your metatags and body of your content. You will be able to establish an online presence quickly, providing you follow the steps to get your site launched.

When registering your domain name, try to register other TLD extensions so as to avoid cyber-squatters and spammers damaging your brand credibility. I try to in most cases register the dot com and also (.co.uk) whenever possible. As an example, I have developed www.ukwebsitedesigners.co.uk and the dot com is held hostage by a domainer, good luck to him selling the dot com because I will come after him/her with a UDRP if he/she does. For me, I use a sub-directory (pages) for my services and have used a sub-domain for my blog. What is good though is to have a separate blog for each service. For example, a person looking for content writing may not think to click my site UK Website Designers even though I do have a dedicated page. Sometimes it is better to add a completely independent site and link it to your website: (www.ukcontentwriters.com).

With my blog for this site, I set up a sub-domain, I then actually regretted what I had done because it has made a long tail URL: www.ukdomainbrokers.com

https://ukdomainbrokers.ukwebsitedesigners.co.uk

So I then forwarded the domain name www.ukdomainbrokers.com to it. I, therefore, do not recommend sub-domains, because long tail URLs are a nightmare and will roll off your WordPress page in mobile view unless you make the text small or write a keyword and hyperlink it. I am using font size pt 12 for demonstration purposes of my long tail URLs.

Interlink: Pros and Cons of Subdomains and sub-directories.

Building A Brand

Your brand should distinguish you from all other businesses selling similar products and services. You should be the leader that makes your brand name stand out. For example, there can only be one ‘UK Website Designers’ or ‘UK Domain Brokers’, ‘UK Content Writers’, you get my drift. There are many brands trying to secure their global positioning, but the secret is in the domain name.

Your product or service must be of equal quality. You need to show you are producing good work and that your customers are satisfied. Your brand will show credibility and trustworthiness and is the driving force behind every campaign you create, and every product or service you launch.

Blogging

Whether you are making a blog for your established business or starting out, a blog is an online journal that updates your audience. Your blog could be a tutorial or news site, it could be a directory or forum, and your blog could even have a shop.

Unlike websites that are basically online business cards, a blog has more options and flexibility. A website does nothing more other than describing the business, as well as advertise and sell your products and services in an e-commerce store, but it does not tell stories.

For your audience to buy from you, you must capture their attention. You need to write about things that relate to your brand, product, and service, you need to entertain your audience and make the content you are writing valuable.

In contrast, blogs delve deeper and are more helpful in showing who you are as a brand and not just what you are selling. With an exact match searchable keyword or phrase domain name and the help of your blog, you can share content and comment on industry trends, which reinforces your company’s authority. 

Blogs allow your audience to engage in your platform to leave comments and suggestions. Blogs let users know about different topics of discussion. Your blog may have many categories and a search bar to find content quickly. Your blog should also have a subscribe option so that you can then build an email list and send the latest news and offers by email.

Blogs make your brand look more personal. It shows that you are human and more than a company selling products and that you are also reaching your audience and telling stories, through engaging content.

Build Brand Awareness

Your brand needs to secure global positioning to stand out in the industry. The more times your brand is mentioned the more likely it will be remembered, and this is where blogs come in handy to spread brand awareness. Each time you write a post, you are advertising your brand by sharing it on social media. In this era of saturated competition, it is important to make yourself look like an expert in your field to outshine the competitors.

With a well-written blog, you can easily attract your audience by providing quality content. If you entertain and teach your audience, they are more likely to come back and then buy your products and services. You need to show your readers that you are an expert so that customers feel safe to trust an expert company or service provider.

To stand out from the crowd you need to show you are a leader in your sector. It helps build a relationship of trust and credibility, thus, increasing the chances of building a firm foundation that people are compelled to come back to.

Organic Traffic

If you have an SEO link wheel of multiple blogs, you will fundamentally generate traffic from multiple directions to your (default website). There are many strategies for generating traffic but by far blogs are the ultimate force. By writing articles regularly and sharing them on social media, you will start to get free organic traffic in no time, which means that your audience will mostly contain people with a genuine interest in the product and service you are offering and writing about. Having a sound SEO strategy can help to attract new customers.

Link Building

Inviting guest bloggers to write on your blog and backlinking helps both you and the writer. Sharing your content on social media pages, groups and forums also helps to drive traffic. Unlike inbound linking, internal linking is something that you oversee. Inbound linking is where something you have published previously can be linked to your latest article on their site. Internal linking is a quick way to refer to another page, category, or article.

If you have multiple sites if say you cross-link an article you have written on one site and mention it on the other it all helps improve the success of your SEO and ranking. The more links you create inbound, outbound, or internal the higher you will climb and attract more potential leads and traffic. 

There are 200 factors considered by the Google algorithm, with inbound links and backlinks being important. It is assumed by experts that backlinks are the 3rd most important search engine optimization strategy. In fact, 41% of experts say that building links is the most difficult part of SEO.  When you link a site for example Wikipedia which has high Domain Authority, you can set your blog to ping them when you have published your article. This then sends a signal (email) for them to look at your article and if they see it is relevant to their audience, may indeed give you a backlink back. I usually allow for pingbacks to high authority sites because search engine algorithms can then detect the link.

Creating articles that are relevant to your audience and to businesses that are considered industry leaders can help you gain more relevant links. If people engage in what you are writing and believe your content can help their readers, they will ask you to mention them. Creating links to authoritative websites or getting recommendations from other websites signals to search engines about your trustworthiness and expertise in your specific industry. Backlinks also help to rank you higher for MOZ DA where you build your domain authority, which also helps you improve your overall popularity in search engines.

Email Marketing

They say, “The money is in the list”, this means the more subscribers you have the more likely they will buy from you because they have shared their email addresses with you. They want your newsletters, updates, and offers. Email marketing is undoubtedly a strong marketing tool.

To get people to subscribe either you have to have really good content that your readers like and want more of, or you offer a free e-book or a gift in exchange for their email. People are more likely to trust your email newsletters if they think that your blog content is relevant, engaging, and, most importantly, informative. 

Social Media

Spreading brand awareness is not only about social media, having your blog linked in your email signature, and wearing custom apparel all help with spreading the word. Apart from all the traditional methods of advertising and marketing, there are social media. I find that certain social media platforms perform better than others. Because I am a B2B service I find LinkedIn one of my favorite places to hang out on. I also have signed up for many pages and groups. Depending on the campaign and what I am promoting at the time, will depend on where I advertise. I very rarely use paid advertising because my exact match searchable keyword and phrases domain names usually are found on the first pages of search engines anyway, so I save myself money. Whenever I create a website or blog, I usually also create a Facebook Page to complement the default sites. I then link the pages to the sites.

A blog post is easy to share on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Every time you create a blog post, you should share it on your best-performing social media platforms. This then allows your friend, family, and connections to share your content if they find it valuable.

Sharing your content; allows your audience to learn about you. For example, on LinkedIn, you have your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd connections, and depending on the settings people may see your content even though they are not connected with you. This is an assured way of gaining new clients. Sharing your content on social media also decreases your workload and you can share the same article across multiple platforms rather than writing new articles many times in a week.

Start-ups

When you first start out with blogging you need to put the work in to get traction. A blog is not miraculously going to get on the first page of Google without you doing some hard work. For the first month or so you need to build up your blog to have many categories and articles, a bare blog is boring. You also need to perform SEO (this is important).

I have found if I write a couple of articles a day and I manually upload each page (article) to Google they index and rank my articles relatively quickly. I once had an article indexed and ranked in six minutes in the past.

As your site becomes more established you can ease off slightly with the blogging. It is possible to take a break from your blog for days, the reason being blogs can have long-term results. If you have a niche blog that is already established there might be tonnes of information that the new reader may find informative.

People assume that a blog has a short life cycle but if the information on the blog is valuable if will earn its foothold for many years to come. Ranked blogs can get traffic for many years, providing there is ample content. Blogs can generate long-term results and help your brand get better recognition.

Monetization.

You have built your blog, and you are getting traffic, but you could also monetize your blog with affiliate links and adverting banners. If you use a third-party affiliate program you need to have a lot of traffic to your blog/articles to get a conversion. It is estimated that for every 100 visitors you will get 1 click at a ratio of 1% however the percentage varies between (0.5% – 1%) and even then after the cookies are placed on the reader’s computer which could be 30 -120 days if this person does not return to the advertiser’s site you lose out on the commission. In other words, to get say 10 clicks you should have 2000 visitors at a ratio of 0.5%.

Blogs By Industry.

(Put a Location+Keyword in your Domain Name or vice versa).

Domain Names Sellers Blog.

If you are selling domain names you could have an article for each domain name you are promoting. Not only will your domain name get eyeballs, but it will also help your blog with ranking. Share each article on social media business platforms, groups, and pages.

Simply listing your domain names on a blog and doing little else is not going to get your domain name found. Even the big marketplaces do not do any SEO and showcasing your domain costs money.

You need to put the domain name in the header title of your article and perform SEO.

I did read not so long ago that one does not need to do SEO by a very famous domain investor and I thought to myself he got lucky when he sold his domains for millions in the dot com boom era but he is certainly not an SEO expert hence why his own website is not on the first page of Google other than for his name, but not for the keywords (Domain Brokers, Domain Brokering, Domain Investing or Domain Selling), which proves my point, that your personal name unless someone actually knows you, will not be searched for. You need to be famous to rely on your name alone to sell your products and services. Do not hold all your eggs in one basket.

The World is Your Oyster.

Whatever you feel passionate about, you can develop just about any topic you feel comfortable writing. Having multiple blogs helps generate traffic and draws in loyal customers. If say you love fashion, then become a fashion influencer, or if you like traveling write about the different locations you have visited. If you are a food business, you could share recipes and tips. You could also write about hosting parties. The categories I have mentioned above should give inspiration and if you need help choosing a domain name or setting up a blog we are here on hand.

Blogging for Business

Blogging has many benefits, blogging can help to launch new products or campaigns, it also helps with brand awareness, and it drives organic traffic. Blogs can motivate and inspire people. Blogs let your visitors learn about you and your company and the products and services you provide. Blogs drive targeted traffic to the search terms used so that you have an intended audience for the product or service you are marketing and advertising.

Speculate to Accumulate

When selling domain names, the number of businesses that I have come across that simply say they are not interested before I can get a word in edgeways is unbelievable, they are usually too set in their way and think that their one and only website will suffice. But what if they could expand their SEO Link Wheel imagine how much traffic they could generate.

Blog Development

I believe a business that does not have the time or staff to undertake a project could hire a website designer or content writer to develop a blog or two for them. UK Website Designers can create blogs for £19.99 per month including domain name registration provided the domain name in question is available and not brokered. Please contact us regarding e-commerce sites.

When you have a store on your main website it would also be good to open integrated stores as additional income streams.

If you want to try it yourself we are an IONOS Partner and IONOS offers excellent packages for WordPress and Web Builder to include in most cases a free domain name for the first year.

Some businesses are too busy to faff about with blogs or may not have the money. But blogging is far cheaper than advertising and marketing. A lot of businesses are reluctant about starting a blog despite the benefits. Blogs may at first seem challenging, but once you get the hang of it, it’s child’s play. We will send you a “To Do List” free of charge when you subscribe to our mailing list. Remember, the more you invest in your company, the more you get in return.

Blogs are cheap to run if you do them yourself and they are not difficult despite first impressions. Once you get the hang of it there is no going back. A blog lets you stay ahead of your competition. It gets you followers and subscribers, and you can do a multitude of things with a blog from turning it into a directory, forum, or simply a place to showcase your products and services and write content about your niche.

Brand Identity

By far the most important part of blogging is brand identity. Choose your domains wisely.

We recommend (Brand Name + Keyword), or (Location+Keyword). Sometimes domains may not be available but if you do a little tweaking like (Keyword+Location), or (Keyword+Brand Name) you could possibly find a match. An example of a domain name I would love to have had would have been www.renata.com but a watch battery manufacturer acquired the domain name before I twigged so I have settled for www.irenata.com. Sometimes settling for second best is not that bad.

If you want help Designing your site, SEO, Marketing, Content Writing, or simply want some ideas, just drop us a line. Don’t forget if you subscribe or message us we will send you an ‘SEO To Do List’ free of charge.

CONTACT US TODAY!

Happy Blogging!

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