Why blogging can be your secret weapon

Blogging has been around for a long time now and it surprises me how many people aren’t using this secret weapon to fight their way to the top of the rankings and increase their sales exponentially throughout the year. Your blog is more than just a place to post some content that you think will never get read, it’s a place you can build a community off of if you do it right!

When blogging came about, it was mainly used for people to post information about their day and what they were going though. That hasn’t changed much, but now it’s used for businesses to talk about what they are doing day to day and how everything is going on within their industry. The posts are similar but the approach is slightly different. Some of the biggest blogs are owned by individuals posting about a specific niche or industry, not just about themselves. Sure, they could be posting their own experiences and trial and error situations, but they are posting for the sole purpose of increasing their revenue down the road.

Yes, blogging can make you a great deal of money if you do it right, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Blogging is more than a means to make money, it’s a secret weapon that can intimidate your competition or even help others out along their difficult journey. How you use your blog is up to you, but there are a few distinct things that will happen when you blog the right way, and they are:

Increased rankings through specific keyword targeting
When you begin to blog, you may not understand exactly what keyword targeting or SEO is at all, but you might be doing it without knowing. This is a good and bad thing at the same time because you could actually be doing everything well, or you might be hurting your own website or blog while posting. If you don’t understand on page optimization, don’t worry, we would be discussing this in our next post.

Increased engagement through comments and shares
People are always trying to increase their engagement on social media, but what a lot of marketers are forgetting is that you can do this on your own blog as well. You can get people to come in and comment on your posts in order to churn up a conversation, and keep people coming back.

You can also set up your blog to have people log in with their Facebook, twitter, or google+ accounts and easily write content. The only downside to this is that it’s not fully researched to see if the content written up through social media accounts actually gives your website credit for the content or if it just shows up on Facebook, twitter, google+, etc. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t credit your own website, unless you have them register an account on your website which will have them posting to your actual page and not an iframed section that makes it look like the post is on there.

It helps increase your list size
A blog can definitely pull in a great deal of visitors from the search engines and increase your sales, but that’s not the only thing it’s good for. A great thing to use your blog for is to increase your list size! You can write up dozens of blog posts, but you won’t grow you list at all unless you’re asking people to sign up to it.

You’ll need to be nice when asking users to sign up, you can’t just bombard them with email sign up forms because they will jump off your website as soon as that happens. Having one pop up or drop down newsletter sign up form is fine for each time someone is on your website, but that’s it. Don’t have it pop up with every single page load because that’s annoying. You can also have the form show up when someone is trying to leave your website, this gets a decent amount of sign ups when people are actually interested in your website but forget to look for your newsletter opt in form.

Read also Why should a business have a website

Builds trust before people make a purchasing decision
People regularly look through a company blog before making a purchasing decision. They will look to see if the website and business is active, if it is, it shows that they are serious about their product or service and help increase your sales because of it.

Building up your content will bring people in and hopefully share your content. You will also see people talking about your blog after they find you, and usually it’s positive content that will show up in the search results when someone is searching for reviews about you in order to make a purchasing decision. So if you think about it, a blog is it’s own sales funnel that will bring in plenty of visitors, sales, sign ups, etc.

In Conclusion
A blog is more than just a page on your website with some additional content about your niche. It’s a sales funnel that encourages people to purchase from you without having to contact you first. If you don’t already have a blog on your website, you’ll want to get started on one because it has many benefits and can help you across the board