7 Benefits of Blogging for Small Businesses and Freelancers
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There are lots of great benefits of blogging for small businesses and freelancers. Blogging can help you attract potential customers and clients, build trust, and get your products or services out there.
If you’re considering getting into blogging for your business, you’ve come to the right place! In this post, we’ll cover 7 top benefits of small business and freelancer blogging:
- Drive traffic to your website
- Create brand awareness
- Build customer trust
- Establish your business as a thought leader
- Increase search engine optimization (SEO)
- Help customers understand your products or services
- Create social media posts from your blog copy
Read on to find out more!
Drive Traffic to Your Website
If potential customers don’t know you exist, they’re not going to buy from you! Blogging is a great way to increase the number of visitors to your website. A study from Hubspot showed that business blogging can increase website visits by an average of 55%.
The more visitors you get, the more likely you are to secure a client or sell a product.Once a visitor is on your website, they’ll likely explore beyond their initial landing page. A visit to your blog post could turn into a visit to your product or services page, a completed “contact me” form, or a new sign-up to your mailing list.
Create Brand Awareness
Creating brand awareness is a critical step in raising the profile of your small business or freelance services. As well as increasing the number of visitors to your website, blogging can help you establish your brand voice and identity.
Blogging provides an opportunity to engage with both existing and potential customers and tell them who you are and what you stand for. And, of course, why they should be interested in paying for your product or service.
Build Customer Trust
Attracting customers is only half the battle – making sure they return is also crucial to your success. To do this you need to establish trust. That means getting them to trust you, what you say, and the products or services you offer.
Well-written, informative, engaging blog posts are great for building relationships. If your customers feel they know you and share your values, they’re much more likely to keep buying from you and spreading the word about your business.
Your blog posts should be centered around your products or services, but that doesn’t mean they need to be overly salesy. This kind of content can be very off-putting for readers, and actually reduce trust. Write about your products or services in a way that is informative and engaging and positions them in a wider context. For example, if you only sell carefully sourced, sustainable products, blogging about the wider issues around carbon footprint, food miles, fair trade, and environmental impact will show customers that you’re serious about your business’ ethics. That will encourage them to trust your product and what you tell them about your business.
Establish Yourself as a Thought Leader
As well as helping build customer trust, blogging can help you establish yourself as a thought leader. Thought leadership content is content that demonstrates expertise or innovation within a particular industry, niche, or field.
It’s not just about answering basic questions about things like your pricing or refund policy. It’s about showing customers how your product or service will address their pain points and solve their problems. It’s also about educating them on issues that are relevant to the industry you operate in. A steady flow of this type of content will build your authority, and, in turn, your business’ reputation.
When you write thought leadership content – or any other type of blog post – make sure you always respond to any comments that readers leave. Interacting with your readers will further build trust, enhance your reputation, and drive them to explore the rest of your website.
Increase Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
One of the ways in which blogging increases traffic to your website is by providing ample opportunities for SEO.
Firstly, content that follows Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines – by demonstrating experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness – is ranked more highly on the search results page. As we’ve shown above, blogs are a great way to demonstrate E-E-A-T. They provide the ideal platform to share advice, insights, and opinions.
Secondly, blog posts can be optimized to include relevant keywords, which help Google match your content with user search queries. For example, a post on making kids party food might include keywords or phrases such as “party food”, “kids party food”, “easy party food”, since these are the kind of search terms people might use. There are lots of keyword research tools you can use to determine the best keywords to include in your content. Just be careful to include your keywords smoothly, as Google will penalize obvious keyword stuffing.
Finally, “content freshness” is another factor that search engines like Google use to rank content. Posting new evergreen content regularly and revising old or time-sensitive content can help keep your blog at the top of the search results.
Check out our post, How to Write SEO-Friendly Blog Posts, for our top tips.
Help Customers Understand Your Products or Services
Blogging is a great way of getting more information out there about your products or services. You might explain how they work or highlight key features and benefits.
For example, a clothing business might blog about how to accessorize an outfit. If your customer has bought a black dress, your blog could encourage them to come back for that statement necklace to show off the dress neckline. You’ve helped your customer learn more about putting together a great outfit, and they’ve learned that you know your stuff. Win-win!
If you’re a service provider, your blog could teach the reader more about your industry. For example, as an editor, you could explain the difference between types of editing, provide writing tips, or share your insights on editing different fiction genres.
Create Social Media Posts from Your Blog Posts
Marketing your business is crucial to your success, but you still need time to do all the other stuff involved in running a business. And it’d be nice to have a life too, right? After all, one of the major benefits of being a freelancer is the flexible work-life balance.
Content repurposing, also known as content recycling, is a great way to save yourself some time. Why write something several times if you can just write it once?
Essentially, you can take your blog content, and share it in other places (e.g., on social media, or in an email newsletter). It can be as simple as choosing one of your most popular blog posts and sharing a link to it on social media with an enticing caption that encourages people to read more.
There are lots of social media management tools that make this process quick and easy. Many can even be set up to post your blog content automatically!
Becoming A Freelance Writer
If we’ve inspired you to write and you’d like some training, taking our Becoming A Freelance Writer course is a great way to kickstart a freelance career. As a freelance writer, you could find yourself writing blogs for businesses, producing articles for print media, and more. Our course will show you how!
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