Have you made some business-related wishes, too, on New Year's Eve?
We wish you all the luck achieving all your business goals for 2017 and, moreover, we're here to help you steer your efforts in the right direction, by offering you valuable information throughout the year.
Still, before we go on to the “valuable information sharing part”, let us dare you to answer to a slightly “tricky” question: What makes you stand apart from the crowd of entrepreneurs and small-business owners in your niche striving to "wow" their customers (and their possible collaborators and competitors, too) with their business websites?
Does your Drupal website feature a stunning design?
OK, so a great web designer from Toronto has designed your site so that it should visually delight your visitors, but is that enough to make them come back?
They'll see the same “visually arresting” design over and over again after all (for no reasonable website owner would go for a complete redesign of his/her company website on a weekly or on a monthly basis, right?)
Isn't this rather just a short-time “wow” effect instead?
Does your website “lure” your visitors with “hard to resist to” products or services?
Then you seem to have all the chances to distract your visitors' attention from all your “rivals'” similar products/services.Your website might just steal all the spotlights in your niche, but how do you actually light their path to your great products/services showcasing website?
Also, which will be the signals that will let Google know that your website's worthy of its attention?
Are you relying exclusively on the content that you boosted your business website with when you launched it (product descriptions, services description, a few words about the team behind and a few lines about your company's values) for getting inbound links and for ranking for long-tail keywords?
Just be honest with yourself when you answer these questions!
If you want to set yourself apart in today's digital landscape you need much more than “just” amazing graphics and great products/services.
You need to offer added value to your customers.
You need to engage.
You need to “humanize” your business (even if just a bit).
You need to share some of your expertise with your audience and not just to sell them stuff.
You need a company blog!
Now, without any further ado, let's break down the 11 reasons why “creating a company blog” should be on top of your priorities list for 2017:
1. It Makes a Great “Channel” For Engaging With Your Customers
No major or minor brand can afford to “just” present/talk to something to their audiences, since their customers expect to be engaged, they look for interaction and “dialogue” instead of “corporatestalk” (or better said “monologue”).
This being said, a company blog, through its comments section, will help you create the perfect context for “chatting” with your audience.
Challenge them to share their own suggestions with you, their feedback and critics, too. They'll, then, realize that you care for their opinions and that will make them stick around, while you'll get to collect some “gold” information about them. Information that will help you craft your future engaging blog posts.
2. It Invests Your Brand With a (Unique) Personality
“Blogging”, even if it's technical information that you share with your audience, tends to be a lot about how you write and not just about what you write. Blog posts are not simply information-stuffed articles, you know.
No reader, no matter how technical savvy or expert in a certain field might be, will land on your blog to read posts written in a purely impersonal, lacking personality type of style.
Trust us, they don't! Any Toronto developer will confirm you this.
Instead, dare breathing some life into your blog posts (instead of making them sound as if written by a machinery), make them tell chapters of your company's story, too, while informing or entertaining your audience.
A little joke here and there, a highly suggestive quote, an unexpected comparison or, even better, a true personal story would instantly draw them in, keep them engaged, keep them reading (for let's face it: 99% of blogs in a niche cover pretty much the same topics, so it's how they do it that makes all the difference).
3. It Helps You Put a “Face” On Your Audience
Remember that we've mentioned, in our last post In 2016 about learning "to “exploit” analytics and adopt a “data-driven” business mentality in the year to come"?
Well, 2017 is here and you need to learn to get the most out of the priceless data that your blog offers you "on a silver plate".
Take a look "behind the curtains" and discover which posts are more popular among your visitors. It's this data that will determine the choice of your future topics.
Take a look at the comments that your users are "spoiling" you with. They, too, tell you plenty of valuable information about your audience, if you just know how to decypher them.
Find out what they liked and disliked about your blog posts, what suggestions they wrote there, what words and expressions they used more frequently, whether they're beginners or experts in the field etc.
4. It's No Longer a “Should”, but a “Must” for SEO
People love high-quality content which adds value to their lives (whether it keeps them informed, it educates them or entertains them) and which they can relate to, which “oozes” personality, so to say.
And search engines love the content that people love.
That's probably the simplest way to resume how the whole “getting yourself a constantly updated blog for SEO reasons” scenario works.
If we are to detail it a bit, here are some of the favorable contexts for business growth that your blog will create for you:
1. More content (more blog posts) means:
- more pages under your domain name indexed in Google
- more chances to rank for a wider array of keywords
- increased traffic on your site
- the chance to rank not just for certain business-specific keywords, but for higher-converting, long-tail queries, too
2. Valuable content means:
- building trust and credibility, 2 foundation stones of your relationship with your audience
- more backlinks (or inbound links, if you prefer to call them this way), including those “priceless” ones coming from high-authority blogs, from experts in your field etc.
Imagine your blog (one fully fledged with high-quality content) as a constant “leads converter” in the years to come, a great business initiative for any future-oriented entrepreneur.
And you do fall into this category, right?
5. It Boosts Your Social Media Efforts
You can't even start drafting a social media strategy without considering the need to post great (and regular) content right?
But where will you be getting this valuable content on a regular basis from?
From your future company blog, obviously!
Why should you share exclusively content created by other “gurus” in your field, when you could share links to your own blog posts? It will help you direct your users to your Drupal website (and this is a highly valuable strategy especially if it's an e-commere website that you own).
Moreover, your future blog will make an amazing source of unique, high-quality content for your email newsletters, too.
How does an email “reminder” highlighting 5 of the most popular posts within a month sound to you?
And these are but 5 of the 11 benefits that we've selected for you, benefits that you can “exploit” for growing your business with the help of a valuable and engaging content-loaded blog. We'll reveal to you and detail the other 6 benefits from our list in tomorrow's post.
Stay tuned!
