Do you have a blog for your business? If not, you could be missing out on a ton of leads.

I’m not just saying this as a content writer: blogs are one of the best ways to promote your business, passively gain sales, and build and diversify your digital presence. 

Yes, I know, I’m massively biased. But, I’m not alone in my thinking. Let’s take a look at some stats:

• Blogging leads to 55% more website visitors. (Hubspot)
• Companies that blog report 67% more leads per month than companies that don’t. (Demand Metric)
• As the fourth largest ROI, SEO will remain a key investment for 88% of marketers who are currently using it. (HubSpot)
• 64% of the B2B marketers with the highest success rate have a content strategy. (Content Marketing Institute)
• 91% of B2B companies are using content marketing in their strategies. (Content Marketing Institute)
• The most successful B2B marketers allocate around 40% of their budget to content marketing. (Content Marketing Institute)
• 79% of marketers use blogs as a way to distribute their content. (Content Marketing Institute)

It’s clear, then, that top marketing agencies consider blogs to be an important investment. But, how exactly do blogs generate leads, and is the ROI worth it? Here are five huge benefits of blogging for business.

What Is Business Blogging?
Business blogging is a marketing tool designed to improve your website’s SEO, inform your customers, showcase your company’s expertise, and ultimately gain sales. An excellent business blogging strategy should generate leads and sales over time, improve your digital presence, and gain trust and loyalty from your target customers.

Drive traffic to your site

Probably the most obvious reason for having a blog is to drive traffic to your site, organic or otherwise. 

Businesses that blog see 55% more website visitors. It makes sense. If you put more content on your site, then there are more opportunities for browsers to visit. But, you can’t just slap up a weekly blog and hope that people will come.

Businesses that produce consistent, strategized, and well-written content start seeing a significant ROI within 6 – 12 months. This takes work. You must take the time to understand your audience and their pain points so that you can address their queries in your blog. On top of this, you need to make sure that you’re reaching the correct audiences. Traffic doesn’t matter unless the traffic that you attract converts into sales. 

Besides bringing in the proper audience, you also have to compete with trillions of existing content pieces on top of millions of other pieces that get uploaded every day. SEO is more difficult now than it has ever been. In order to organically drive traffic to your site, you need a strong strategy that is measurable, monitored, and adjusted over time. 

That being said, blogs that rank drive massive amounts of traffic to your site, and it makes your company look great. When you’ve been chosen by the Google gods, your company becomes a trustworthy source of information and, therefore, much more attractive to your customers. 

2. Improve your digital presence and build a comprehensive online strategy

While gaining organic traffic through SEO is one goal of a business blog, it shouldn’t be your only one. It is incredibly difficult to rank, especially for high-trafficked keywords, so if you are only blogging for SEO, you might not see the results that you want.

The good news is that there are many more benefits to blogging, like improving your digital presence. Your digital presence is super important. (You can read more about that here.) Blogs are a fantastic way to improve it. 

Not only do blogs provide the space for you to showcase your company’s expertise in its field, but they can also be used as a way to create more content. Use your blog posts to drive your social media strategy. Create a video as a companion to the blog. Bring a collection of blogs together in order to create an e-book.

While blogs are not the only form of digital content, they can be a fantastic springboard from which you can create a comprehensive content strategy that reaches audiences across platforms.

Learn more ways to turn old blogs into new content here.

3. Stand out from your competitors

Blogging allows your company to showcase its expertise in its industry. When your clients and customers see a carefully cultivated collection of posts that dig deep into certain topics, they’ll feel secure knowing that your company is a thought leader. This establishes trust even before they reach out for your offerings.

As seen in the stats listed above, most marketers are investing in a content strategy. If your company isn’t working on its blog, then it’s falling behind. On top of this, you need to make sure that your blog is heads and shoulders above the blogs of your competitors. Not only will this improve your SERP ranking, but it will also show your customers a superior understanding of your industry. Both of these considerations will help your company stand out from your competitors.

On the other hand, if you allow your competitors to continue with their blog strategies while you ignore your own, target customers will view your competitors as the loftier choice, even if your company offers better services. The way that you are perceived online is a massive factor, and blogging elevates your appearance.

4. Solidify your brand and align with your target customers

Blogging allows your company to really delve into its branding and voice. This can be especially important for newer brands that are still getting to know their audience and positioning. Blogs often require a deep-dive into your brand’s approach and ways of thinking, and by creating a business blog, you can take some time to establish where your brand stands and what you want your messaging to be.

It also helps customers to get to know your brand on a deeper level, even before they reach out to you. According to Google Cloud, 82% of shoppers wish to support brands with aligning values. In addition, 75% would stop supporting a business with conflicting values. Blogging gives your company a platform to express its principles more deeply, bringing in customers who may have been on the fence about your services. It simply gives them another reason to love your company.

5. It works for you over time

Business blogging doesn’t work instantly. However, over time, its ROI can be significant. 

Blogging is more of a passive form of marketing. This means two things: 1) You will not see instantaneous results. 2) A single blog post might provide a greater ROI over time than more direct methods.

Let’s say you write one blog, post it, and distribute it to your social media channels. The first week that it’s posted, it might result in 10 sales. But, over time, you’ll see the blog post getting a little more traffic, and once it’s indexed by Google, it reaches front-page SERP ranking. Then, in one month, you’ve received 50 sales from the blog post, and even a year or two later, you still see that single blog post working for you, generating a handful of leads and sales per month.

While loads of immediate sales from a single blog post would be fantastic, that’s not the point. A well-written blog post will work for years, gradually gaining leads, until its sales eventually hit the thousands. Now, imagine you have dozens of blog posts that gain one or two sales per week over the course of a number of years. That’s a pretty big return.

Blogs can also save you time. If you see that your customers commonly ask questions surrounding a certain topic, you can write a blog about it. Then, in the future, simply send the blog each time the question is asked rather than having to write a long response every time.

Although blogging can directly generate leads and sales, this is not its only goal. It’s also an excellent tool that can be used in many ways to streamline the sales process.

As a content writer, I absolutely adore blogs and everything that they can do. But, my biased opinion isn’t the only reason why your company needs to invest in its blogging strategy. There are so many ways that your blogs work for you over years. While the initial investment of both time and money might feel significant, in the long run, the ROI makes it more than worth it.

Interested in growing your company’s blog and improving your digital presence? I can help with that! Let’s chat.