We all know that social media is all the rage for businesses to connect with their existing customers, meet new customers and give value to your connections. A great addition to being active on the social sites is having a central hub for all your communication, which is a business blog.

Having a presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn really is critical to becoming social with the right kinds of people. Once you have established a relationship on these sites an important next step is to get them to your blog where they can get to know you a little more intimately. Once they are on your blog, they can explore your business and its products and services even further, a big bonus.

It’s called permissive marketing, not interruptive marketing like newspaper and publication ads, radio and TV commercials, etc. Your social media connections arrived at your blog by their own free will. It is the new marketing strategy that is making businesses wildly profitable.

Think of your blog as the nucleus and all the other social media sites as outposts that orbit around it and point to it; or think of this analogy, it’s that important business lunch that derived from a cocktail party (social media).

It may seem obvious the benefit of your blog to your reader-it provides informative, relevant, and entertaining content that will help them make more confident buying decisions. But what are the specific benefits to your business? Glad you asked, here are 6 of them…

Blog Benefits For Your Business

1. Gives you a personality-what better way to humanize your company than a blog that talks and interacts like a human being? Blogs do an excellent job of branding you. They aren’t corporate websites, so they are meant to be more casual and hence more engaging. Bloggers relate to their customers and their unique struggles and share solutions to these problems.
2. Thought Leader Influence-blogs allow you to behave as a thought leader for your industry. Good bloggers will update their readers with cutting edge information on their industry and give them useful tips accordingly. For example: a real estate agent will share the latest interest rates or tax incentives with their readers and give advice inregards to this factual information. Or a HVAC specialist will share information on the government’s recent energy-efficient tax credits available. If you are giving them these kind of updates it creates a sense of trust and that you are an expert in your field.
   
3. Creates a Sense of Community-blogs are interactive and readers can leave comments on postings which increases their emotional investment in the blog and keeps them coming back or encourages them to subscribe to your newsletter.
4. More Engagement and Returning Customers via Newlsletters-almost every blog you see has a little opt-in webform box that will have a unique gift or offer if someone subscribes to your newsletter. Your reader will hand over their email and name and then you have a more devoted following that you can send exclusive sales and information to. The goal is to make it so they wouldn’t think of ever buying from your competitor-how could they after all the time and value you have devoted to them?
5. Boosts Organic Search Traffic-blogs are constantly changing entities, making them more appealing to search engines. A good blogger will also include strategic keywords within posts, and inbound and outbound links, which further increases your chances of getting found by search engines. When done right, you are getting free traffic in front of your business-thousands of eyeballs on your products and services. Now that’s important. When you coordinate your powerful social presence with your blog, this is also free traffic and creates influential inbound links to your blog which google will favor you more for. Social media is key in this whole equation and as you can see very important in several ways.
6. Low-Cost Investment-blogs are very affordable. A self-hosted site will cost you about $10/month. Getting a blog up and running doesn’t take a techie (I did it and I am far from techie). WordPress.org (highly recommended) is fairly user-friendly. However, you can hire a web/graphic designer to create a fantastic branded site very quickly and teach you how to navigate inside of it.

There is a time investment in creating content though. But again, you can hire and work with a social media manager to do this all for you. Bee Social, LLC  (shameless plug, I know) can do all of this for you and depending on your needs completely manage and monitor everything with your blog or assist you with parts of blogging and/or website development. Check out our Blog Management services to learn more.

Bee Social can also create an affordable or highly customized blog for you as well, learn more here: Web & Blog Design.

Well I hope this has relayed the importance of owning a business blog. Let us know if Bee Social can help you out in any way.

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To Your Social Success,