How Every Single Business Can Benefit From a Blog Getting website traffic isn't rocket science. You can see incredible gains by simply creating a curated blog.
By Mike Templeman Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Ensuring people regularly visit and engage with your website is a critical requirement in the new digital landscape.
As the CEO of a digital-marketing firm, I'm constantly asked by friends, acquaintances and total strangers what is something they can do to get more eyeballs on their website. The reasons why vary. Everything from improving conversions, increasing traffic, boosting SEO rankings, lowering bounce rate and or increasing customer's time on site is mentioned.
Luckily for them, there is a simple tool that can improve every one of these categories and is easy to implement: a curated blog.
Related: The Rule of 5 for Bloggers
Having a blog on your website is practically a necessity in the online world. The search engines have established that rich and engaging content is an essential piece in their ranking algorithms. Additionally, customers are demanding more and more from companies as they become better educated and more informed.
Giving your customers information for free on your blog is a great way to satisfy this demand. With regards to customer interactions metrics such as: time on site, bounce rate and conversions, a blog can help all of these aspects. And with strong calls to action and great designs, a blog can also be an excellent conversion tool for your business. (One of our clients, who implemented a blog a little over a year ago, saw an increase in their organic traffic of almost 200 percent.)
So, what are some of the strategies you can implement to see similar results?
Have calls to action. A call to action is exactly what it sounds like -- it's a call to your customers to take an action. This can be a button that asks them to subscribe to your newsletter or it could be a little bit of text weaved into a post reminding your reader about your company's services or products.
The bottom line is that customers react to being told what to do. Every form of successful advertising incorporates calls to action. So, place them strategically on your blog and within your posts.
Related: 21 Ways to Make Your Boring Trade Blog Interesting
Provide real value. Your customers want to be entertained and informed. Writing about why you're the best at this or that is anything but entertaining. Instead, give them real value. For instance, write how-to posts on questions that your customers regularly ask. Or follow the news about your industry and then give your opinion on large issues and how they'll affect your customers.
As I mentioned in point above, you can still ensure that your customers know what you do by giving them a friendly reminder, but don't beat them over the head with your sales pitch. Give first, then you'll receive.
Images and titles. There are hundreds of theories as to why certain posts do better than others. Yes, the content within the post plays a big role but so do images. A post is judged immediately by its title and the image associated with it. So make sure to not only think about catch headlines but also catchy images. Images showing emotions such as people laughing or yelling cause instinctive reactions and may produce more clicks.
Additionally, the title needs to grab your customer's attention. Teases, lists and questions will all cause your customers to click on your post.
Creating a great blog does take time and effort. And the more time you spend on posting and responding to comments, the more benefits your blog will produce. But rest assured that there is almost nothing more impactful or more cost effective that you could do with that time.
