Warning: You're Losing Money If You're Not Publishing Blog Posts
If you’re not publishing business blog posts, sound the alarms and go on high alert immediately. Why, you may ask?
You’re losing out on the easiest money-generating machine for your business imaginable.
Now don’t get me wrong–I realize correlation does not equal causation–but this has been proven time and time again. Take HubSpot for example: 90% of their generated leads each month come from already published blogs.
That’s powerful stuff.
Don’t be fooled–blogging consistently is difficult, but so is sitting there watching money being set on fire.
In this blog post, I’m going to show you why blogging is such a great lead-generating tool, and how you can get started (very meta, I know).
The Benefits of Publishing Blog Posts
I could sit here and regale you with the power of blogging all day, but that does nothing unless you see empirical evidence for yourself. So instead, let’s get our science goggles on and channel our Bill Nye the Science Guy brains.
This is a graph from HubSpot showing the true unlocked potential of blogging:
Image credit to HubSpot's blog here.
While constructing a blogging strategy takes time and resources, consider it investing in your future, and not in the annoying way like your parents used to tell you while in grade school.
Business blogging is extremely effective, and accomplishes the following:
- Drives traffic to your website
- Helps convert those visitors into leads
- More indexed pages on your website
- Your SEO influence also expands, and you get more chances to rank for keywords (both short-tail and long-tail depending on your business)
- Shows you’re a thought leader in your industry
- Works full-time for you–365 days a year, 24 hours a day, etc.
You probably have that one workaholic in the office who gets there early, stays late, and is always working with coffee for blood? Imagine that x100–and it’s your blog.
So you see the benefits, and don’t worry, I know your eyes are bulging with dollar signs coming out of them this very moment. This all may be fine and dandy, but how will it make you money?
Blogging Makes Money, if Done Correctly
I mentioned earlier how a blog helps you convert visitors into leads. Well, that’s exactly how you generate revenue. See the inbound methodology below:
You help get contacts from your blog, and from there, you can nurture them into each stage of the methodology in order to close them as a customer.
Now don’t come running back to me if you post and it’s not immediately making your business bank account overflow; blogging juice takes time, and builds up exponentially IF EXECUTED CORRECTLY. You want to ensure your blog is optimized, which includes:
- Having a call-to-action (CTA) at the bottom of your blog posts, and throughout (anchor text)
- Ensuring your keywords are being tracked for that page
- That you have enticing meta descriptions within the character limit
- That you have image(s), and those images have alt text
- Creating internal links, so visitors can travel to other parts of your site
- Making headers as appropriate
Doing these things will also clear up questions prospects might have as they travel from a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL). You can use this content to vamp up marketing and sales library so true harmony can ring across the land–and those sales will happen more efficiently.
Added Pros of Blogging
As we’ve said in previous posts, more and more people are going through a majority of the buyer’s journey without contacting anyone.
By blogging, you’re giving them a plethora of content and knowledge to help educate them, and by proxy they’ll associate that knowledge with your business. This is what it means to achieve thought leadership and authority in your industry.
That goes a long way in terms of earning customers–brand recognition is powerful, and your blog is a pivotal way of achieving this.
Get Started
To begin your blogging pilgrimage, come up with a few keywords that get brought up in the sales process; that, or frequent pain point phrases you feel an ideal buyer would be experiencing. From there, it’s research, research, research! Find out where you can get opportunities to rank, flesh out an editorial calendar, and start writing!
Also consider how you can procure gated content offers, so visitors can click CTAs at the end of your blog post and convert.
So what do you have to lose, besides a little bit of time and planning you were going to do anyway? Put that pedal to the medal and get more traffic to your site, and ergo, more visitors, leads and customers!
Original Article