A blog should be a major component of your overall content marketing strategy if it isn’t already.

There are many answers to the question, “How might a business use a blog?” but perhaps the most compelling are the long-term benefits of blogging consistently over time. Blogging long-term drives huge compounding results.

Therefore, the biggest mistake you can make in your online content strategy is not including a blog at all. But not blogging consistently is almost as bad as not having a blog.

What Are the Benefits of Writing a Blog Long-Term?

One of the benefits of writing a blog is that it establishes you as an expert in your field. Consumers often start looking for information about a product they are interested in long before they are ready to buy.

By putting out a blog that continually provides information that is relevant and helpful, you start to establish yourself in the consumer’s mind as an authority on the subject. By connecting with readers through valuable content, you move them to the top of the sales funnel.

Using an SEO monthly package or similar blog writing subscription service can make ongoing blogging easy and effective. An important thing to consider about blogging is that it isn’t just one blog post, it’s a series of posts published periodically throughout the year. This is how you build up a thriving brand that customers engage with.

Establish Your Company as a Trustworthy Source

People in the informational stage of shopping are not always ready to buy right away, so it could be weeks, months or even years before they take the next step. However, by providing them with helpful content and useful data when they are still in the informational stage, you’ve established your company in their minds as a trustworthy source.

This makes it more likely that they will remember your company’s name and come to you when they are ready to buy. Therefore, if you’re wondering how might a business use a blog, one way is to establish your credibility within the industry with consumers. The reputation that you build today can continue as long as your business is in operation.

Get Compounding Results Over Time

The other long-term benefit of a blog is the cumulative results you can get from quality content, also known as compounding results. If you write a valuable evergreen blog post today, you may see modest results from it tomorrow. But those results can continually increase the longer it remains on your site.

For example, you may publish the blog today, tomorrow it may attract 50 new views. Now imagine that half of the people who read your blog share it with others, and each of those shares generates three new views. That’s 75 new views, plus the 50 who read the post initially upon its publication, for a total of 125 new views within a span of two days after you first published the blog.

If your blog is full of valuable information and optimized for search engine performance through the strategic use of relevant keywords, it may eventually rank on the first page of search results. This means that more people will be able to find it and it will continue to draw more traffic to your site. That’s in addition to the views you get from readers sharing it and from your own efforts promoting it on your social media accounts and in your newsletters.

If the blog post contains topical information that is out-of-date before long, it is unlikely to yield many long-term benefits. However, if it is evergreen content that always remains relevant, it could continue to keep working behind the scenes for you to draw more traffic to your website for many years to come.

How might a business use a blog? To continue to drive traffic to the site and generate leads for you with little effort on your part following the initial time investment.

What Are the More Immediate Benefits of Blogging for Marketing?

We have already looked at how might a business use a blog for its long-term advantages. However, blogging can benefit you significantly in the short term as well.

1. Drive Traffic to Your Website

We’ve talked about how blogging can be effective at driving traffic to your website and how blog posts can continue to do so for some time. We’ve addressed that this is a possible answer to the question, “How might a business use a blog?” but we haven’t described how that works.

Essentially, adding new blog posts to your site communicates to search engines such as Google that your site is active. As a result, their programming should tell them to keep checking back frequently for new content. More web pages on your site mean more opportunities for your site to be added to the search engine’s index. This increases the likelihood that your pages will eventually show up on the search engine’s results page, hopefully within the first page of results so that people can find them more easily. This in turn drives more traffic to your site.

Even if you have to pay for the content creation initially, driving traffic with organic searches is much more cost-effective than pay-per-click ads. It also helps introduce your company to people who may not have heard of it otherwise.

2. Convert Traffic Into Leads

Lots of traffic is a good first step, but it wouldn’t be a very good answer to the question, “How might a business use a blog?” if there wasn’t a way for potential customers to take the next step. However, there is a simple way that blogging can help to move customers down the sales funnel, and that is by adding a call to action at the end of the blog. Here is an example:

A call to action encourages viewers to do something after they have read the blog post and gained the information they were looking for. What you ask readers to do in your call to action is up to you. You might ask them to buy something, take advantage of a free offer, learn more by accessing a free whitepaper or eBook or sign up for an electronic newsletter. Whatever you ask people to do in your call to action, you need to be sure that you include a way to do it by providing a button or a link to take them to a product page, signup page, or order form.

This is a simple answer to the question of how might a business use a blog, but remember that “simple” doesn’t always mean “easy.”  You have to create a call to action that is effective and compelling without coming across as too pushy, which can be off-putting and may have the opposite of the intended effect. Even if you have a really effective call to action, it doesn’t mean that everyone who reads your blog will convert to a lead. That’s why it is important to set a benchmark for a visitor-to-lead-conversion rate that you try to reach for the first month and keep trying to improve on that for every month thereafter.

3. Share Your Company News

What more immediate answer for how might a business use a blog than to share news and current events relating to your company? In addition to your evergreen content that is intended to keep generating traffic for you in the long term, you can also use your blog to announce events that you are sponsoring, interviews that you have conducted with industry leaders, new employees you have hired, awards you have won, and case studies that you have participated in.

Some of this type of content may continue to produce compounding results for you in the future. Other posts of this type are ephemeral and will eventually become irrelevant. However, they still have value for you in the short term because they show your audience that there is more to you than just selling products or services and making money. They help to bring out the human side of your brand. Just keep in mind that you can’t take full advantage of compounding results with a blog that’s only company news, so be sure to post plenty of evergreen content in there as well.

4. Build Backlinks

When it comes to how might a business use a blog, building backlinks can be both a short-term and a long-term benefit. Also called an inbound link, a backlink occurs when another website includes a link to one of your pages on one of theirs. This tells readers that your site is trustworthy and contains information that is good or at least relevant.

However, the real benefit of backlinks is that it teaches the search engine algorithm that a website is authoritative. Search engines are programmed to always yield the most relevant search results. Therefore, backlinks can help your search engine ranking. In turn, this can drive more traffic to your site.

5. Establish a Social Media Presence

Blogging can help you establish a social media presence in one of two different ways.

First, the content can be repurposed for you to post on your own social media accounts, thus helping to solve the problem of what to post. Second, by including buttons that make it easy for others to share your blog posts via social media, you help to drive traffic to your site from another avenue.

Why Should You Blog Consistently?

We have answered the question, “How does a blog help your business?” by outlining multiple long-term and short-term benefits. However, it is not enough simply to have a blog, to publish a few posts and call it good. You need to blog consistently according to a regular publication schedule.

Google and the other search engines are always paying attention. If you only post sporadically, or you post a few blog entries and then abandon the blog for months or even years at a time, that tells the algorithms that the blog is no longer active. That, in turn, shows the search engines that the content is no longer relevant. As a result, your ranking on results pages is likely to decrease and your blog is likely to get less traffic, which means that it cannot continue to convert leads or garner backlinks.

While posting more blog posts is generally better, it’s actually more important to post according to a consistent schedule. That way people learn when they can expect new blog posts from you and are ready to consume them upon publication. Therefore, when figuring out how might a business use a blog, you should create a regular publication schedule that you can stick to consistently. This needs to happen even if you are not publishing as often as you would like to. If that means that you only publish once a week, once every two weeks, or once a month, it can still benefit you as long as you are consistent with it.

What Are the Challenges Involved in Blogging for Marketing?

While blogging can offer many benefits, it can also create challenges. One of the biggest challenges is the time commitment involved. The average writer can spend up to four hours per day creating a blog post, which could take up over half of your workday. That might be feasible if you only post one blog post per week, but research shows that you can produce a noticeable increase in traffic by publishing at least 11 blog posts per month.

Another challenge is producing quality blog posts. You may be an expert in your particular field or industry, but you may not know much about grammar or about the craft of creating an engaging, readable document. If your blog posts are hard to read because they are poorly organized or riddled with grammatical errors, it hurts your credibility.

How Can Professional Blog Services Help You Meet These Challenges?

Because consistent blogging leads to such effective long-term results, it makes sense to work with professionals who have been in the blogging industry for years.

Professional content services work with writers who are well trained in creating error-free content that is optimized for search engines. These writers come from many different professional and personal backgrounds and they produce consistent, high-quality results. You can also create your own schedule for ordering content so that you can take advantage of the benefits of more frequent regular posting.

In other words, you get the same results while making a minimal time commitment. Now that you know how a business might use a blog, learn how a blog writing service like BKA Content can benefit you.