To quote from Bill Gates’ 1996 essay, “content is king” which considering the 5 exabytes (that’s 5 Billion Gigabytes) of data now created every two days needs to be updated to “quality content is king”. When it comes to making sure your website is ranked well among natural search results for the profitable keywords that bring you business, content truly is king.

If you are lucky enough to achieve a top ranking on Google or other search engines for a search term that has hundreds or thousands of targeted searches a month, this doesn’t mean your website will maintain that high ranking.

Connecting a blog to your website is one way to return great search engine rankings and increasing the amount of traffic coming to your website.There are a number of great benefits that can come to your business from blogging, let’s look at 6 of them.

1. Maximise your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Just like we were saying before, blogging is great for search engines, not only does it create fresh content to keep the search bot’s coming back to check the new content but it also adds a collection of long tail keywords to your ever expanding list of targeted traffic. Just think about it, say you own a motorcycle tour business and you decide one day to write a blog post about the history of the Ducati, now not only are you going to be gaining traffic from the people searching for tours but also for people interested about the history, and when you have them on your website its much easier for them to click through and see your tours and other services that you provide. Recent HubSpot statistics show that companies that blog get 55% more web traffic than companies that don’t, that’s a lot more potential customers you can reach that your competitors could be missing out on.

2. People don’t buy “what” you do, they buy “why” you do it.

Simon Sinek explains in this video people don’t buy “what” you do, they buy “why” you do it. While that’s a topic for another post blogging is a great way to show the personality of your business and why you love doing what you do. The people that have met you and spoken to you know that you have a personality, and that your business has character, but while reading the sales content on your website the majority of your target market don’t know you from a bar of soap. Writing a blog allows you to show your personality and provide character for the business, this may just be the one point of difference that makes a potential guest decide to stay with you over one of your competitors. If you pride yourself on providing your guests a home away from home, a blog allows you to let your energy and enthusiasm for providing guest a great experience shine through.

3. Become the go to location for trusted quality content

By continuously providing relevant content on your field you are assuring your readers that you are a leader in the field and a great first point of contact for information on that topic. By providing new content at least weekly, your readers will know that the information they are reading will be timely and relevant. Over time as the trust in your blog is established and connection with your writing built you will become their go to location for news. Just like some people prefer one news website over another, readers will start preferring your blog posts over others. This will mean that you and your business will be at the forefront of their mind each time they think of the particular topic.

4. Position yourself as the expert in your field

If you are providing up to date content, linking to other reputable resources and solving your readers problems you will soon be seen as an expert in your topic. Imagine you run a fishing charter business and you blog about a recent trip and some of the catches. In one of the comments on the post a reader asks about a fish he caught, describes it and you are able to tell him what it is, where it is local to and a few basic facts – just by providing this information, and the information in your original post you are proving your knowledge of the field and further expanding your reputation not to mention all the long tail keywords you will start getting found for in search engines.

5. Increase your chances of getting inbound links (link bait)

Whether you like it or not, people like to link to content that they find interesting, these inbound links count towards your placement in search engines and may very well mean the difference between someone finding you or not. By providing interesting content on varied topics you are increasing your chances of people linking to you which in turn increases your search placement and your visitor rates – great news all round!

6. Encourage readers to connect to you

It’s simple really, if you are talking about topics that other people are interested in, they generally want to join in the conversation. Blogging encourages conversation and connectivity and this essentially is the aim (amongst the other benefits above), you want to form a relationship with your readers. Relationship marketing, conversation marketing, social marketing, what ever you want to call it, it all has the same aim – form a bond with your reader, converse about similar topics and over time lead them to purchase from you. We’ve all heard it, it’s 8 times easier to sell to a past client (contact/ reader/ viewer/ follower/ fan/ liker etc) than a brand new contact – establish relationships and connections and build from there. There are excellent comment systems out there that can be bolted onto your website such as http://disqus.com/ which allow people to log in with their social media profiles (such as Facebook and Twitter) allowing your blog to reach even grater audiences.

Now I hear most of you saying “Sounds great but I’m not a writer and don’t have the time…”. Well don’t let those feeble excuses stop you, all you need to do is find a good low cost copywriter and give them a bullet point list of topics and let them do the write he articles. You can then add them to your content management system and schedule them to be published one per week. Set and forget!

If you would like to find a great Australian based copywriter that can produce articles for $25 -$37 for between 350 -650 words then pop in your email and we’ll let you in on the secret!