12 Powerful Benefits of Blogging for Businesses and Brands

We started blogging for Bam Creative way back in 2005. Seems like lifetimes ago now. Since then, our blog design and content, our planning and our goals have changed direction many times. However, one thing is clear. Over the years, it has been a very successful part of our marketing, and has helped us pick up a fair amount of business over the last one and a half decades.

It’s not just us though; businesses the word over are singing the praises of business blogging. Let’s go through 12 benefits of blogging, and why you can enjoy these perks for your brand.

12 benefits of blogging

Before we get into it, here are the dozen benefits of blogging we will discuss in this article;

• Creates authority in your industry
• Create Value for your customers
• Search engine optimisation
• Attracts email subscribers
• Creates awareness of your offering
• Valuable content for your social curation
• Builds important backlinks
• Helps you virtually network
• Highlights your business values
• Supports PR and other marketing activities
• Generates website traffic
• Encourages valuable enquiries

We’ve been doing content marketing for quite some time, both for ourselves and a number of clients. This can range from social media strategy, posting and management, as well as blogging strategy, writing and promotion.

We have seen all of these benefits ourselves or through our clients. Let’s go through them one by one, in more detail.

Creates authority in your industry

For many industries, it is often hard to cut through the noise, and position yourself as someone the media can turn to for a voice bite, or for a potential customer to trust as the authority on your areas of expertise.

One of the major ‘soft’ benefits of blogging is just that; positioning yourself as an authority in your subject area. Do a google search right now for ‘[industry name] experts’ and you’ll find that many of these authority figures have business or personal blogs.

Create value for your customers

This is one of the frequently overlooked benefits of blogging, yet it has huge value for your existing customer base. Being able to answer their concerns or questions in long form, and help educate existing clients at scale has big benefits for them, as long as you let them know about your posts.

A real world recent example of this, was my article last month about how to do your own SEO health check. I had a client a few weeks before that ask me about the best way they could keep an eye on their own search engine optimisation, and I took my few paragraphs of email response, and turned it into a lengthy and actionable blog post, for their benefit and the benefit of everyone who reads it.

Search engine optimisation

Speaking of SEO, one of the top benefits of bogging is the additional text and visual content that you are feeding search engines such as Google by regularly posting on your website. There are a few positive boosts for SEO. There’s both the additional content they can crawl and index, but also the overall freshness of your website, especially if you post a new blog post every week or two.

Attracts email subscribers

So, you want to get to the first page of search engines, so you have better consumer awareness, and by bringing traffic to your blog, you hope to encourage these readers to give us their email address to receive a monthly email newsletter?

With both organic search (people coming from search engines organically, that is, not paid for) as well as direct (typically typing in their URL)

This shows that the majority of visitors to the site, by a long shot, is organic visitors, who account for 66.52% of all traffic.

Many of these visitors also are willing to share their email address, so our client can send a monthly email full of additional great content (and offers). We track these as well, so we can see how we’re going with our email marketing.

That’s a great mailing list; 28,122 people who enjoy their website and specifically, their blog, enough to trust this company with their email address.

A number of these subscribers have gone to be customers as well, so we are building a community and growing the customer base.

Creates awareness of your offering

Let’s take this blog. One of our Top 10 posts so far this year, was posted earlier this year. It got a small amount of interest at the start, and then, over time, it was indexed by search engines and received a very healthy ranking – first page for a number of keywords.

The traffic to this one post looks like:

Now the point of this post, and many of our posts, is to raise awareness that we not only offer services in these areas, and that we know what we’re talking about. So, whilst there’s no immediate financial return, we’re building branding and we do receive enquiries that turn into new clients as a result of our blogging.

Valuable content for your social curation

Let me guess, every week when you are scheduling your business social posts for the week ahead, you spend most of the time trying to decide what topics to cover, or find articles from trusted sources, to share with your audience?

Now imagine if you were regularly posting your own content, which means that you have a whole library of existing material that you can share and re-share with your social followers. Sound good? As someone regularly scheduling social content, that’s another one of my favourite benefits of blogging.

Builds important backlinks

I’m assuming your understand the value of backlinks for SEO, and that you know how important each and every inbound link is for your brand. Blog posts are by far way more attractive for people to link to, than your product page or homepage, no matter how good they look.

Here’s an example. Let’s imagine you have just written an article, and you want to link an external source about saving the environment. Would you link to a local not for profit homepage, or would you rather link to an article that goes into 26 ways you can help save the environment? The latter, of course.

Some of our clients have built thousands of backlinks through blogging consistently, and publishing high quality content. This has been a massive boost to their SEO, which in turn generates traffic and then customers.

Helps you virtually network

Another one of the more ‘soft’ benefits of blogging, however I still feel there’s significant value in this. I’ve been to a few conferences in the last few years, where I have had people introduced to me, who have recalled a blog post they have read of ours.

This, in turn, helps me build real relationships with people, both in the face to face space (pre COVID, of course) and via email and social media.

Highlights your business values

Many modern brands, ourselves included, have strong business values that we work to uphold. A blog helps you promote this, and subconsciously you are likely to be reinforcing your business values, purely in the topics you cover and the articles you publish.

This can help attract new customers, as well as new suppliers and new employees, who find your values align with their own.

Supports PR and other marketing activities

Hopefully you aren’t only using one marketing channel to promote your business, and there’s a good chance that you are also leaning in on public relations, as well as offline marketing as well. One of the lesser considered benefits of blogging is being able to reinforce the messaging you are using elsewhere, on your blog as well.

I am not suggesting that you turn each media release into a blog post, that content is frequently too dry for blogging, however you can offer a detailed analysis of any news, or more behind the scenes perspective on your latest service or product on your blog.

Generates website traffic

Earlier in this article, I already covered backlinks and SEO benefits of blogging What these naturally do is increase the amount of exposure you get on search engines, which in turn, drives more users to your business website.

This, in itself, has no real benefit for your business, however it is far more likely that some of these new visitors will send an enquiry or get in touch, which leads to more sales and profits as a natural result.

Encourages valuable enquiries

Now that we have mentioned attracting enquiries, let’s look at a real example. The results of blogging for a client of ours.

Using pay per click campaigns, which we also manage, we know that a new enquiry costs about $38 to attract. So, could they reduce their spend on pay per click, and make more from their blog? Absolutely!

One of their most popular blog posts has had 10,250 people visit in the last six months. Each visitor on average, spent 3 minutes and 53 seconds on that page, presumably reading it. Out of those, nearly all of them, in fact 10,109 visitors, arrived at this specific article first (called an Entrance page).

Great work on getting new people exposed to the brand, right? Yes. However, we’re interested in enquiries, not just readers.

So, drum roll, how many enquiries have they received?

Google Analytics doesn’t lie; they have received 281 new enquiries, as a result of a single article.

In value, that equates to 281 x $38 = $10,678. That’s how much it would have cost to attract 281 using the pay per click campaigns we have also run for them.

The article certainly didn’t cost anywhere near ten thousand dollars, in fact, the whole six months of blogging would have been covered with that income.

Obviously, that’s not actual sales or profit though – we would expect 100% of enquiries to become sales, and we also know that profits would be far greater than $38 per sale.

All in all, this is an example of a very successful campaign.

via GIPHY

5 Tips on Blogging for Australian Businesses

Now that we have covered the benefits of blogging, what about a few tips for beginner bloggers? Here are five quick tips to help you get started blogging for your business.

1. Have a goal in mind, it could be like these three examples; raising brand awareness, generating sales leads, building a subscriber list.

2. Understand it isn’t an overnight success. Things take time. As shown in the first graph of this article, traffic builds over time to a fantastic article.

3. The more you blog, the better the returns. Some blog posts will get great attention, and others will seem like virtual tumbleweeds. Whilst you can follow a formula, to maximise the chances of the former not the latter, don’t expect all articles to be killer traffic generators.

4. Think of the reader. A great article shares knowledge, such as this one. It’s not all about ‘How awesome our product is’. That’s a long form ad, not an article.

5. Measure everything. The only way I’m able to share some of these success stories, is by measurement. Track everything you can, down to the sale value.

Here's another post we've written on the twelve essential items every business blog should have, which I am positive will also provide value.

Summary

I trust that the above dozen benefits of blogging spelt out, as well as the beginner tips on starting a blog will help make up your mind on the importance of blogging.

Those 12 benefits of blogging again, are;

• Creates authority in your industry
• Create Value for your customers
• Search engine optimisation
• Attracts email subscribers
• Creates awareness of your offering
• Valuable content for your social curation
• Builds important backlinks
• Helps you virtually network
• Highlights your business values
• Supports PR and other marketing activities
• Generates website traffic
• Encourages valuable enquiries

Now you understand and appreciate the importance of investing time and money, creating valuable content that attracts readers. Good luck in starting that blog!