Jemima Writes

While an entire generation of Tamagotchis tragically succumbed to neglect in the bottom of a drawer and, thankfully, the prophesied Armageddon of Y2K came and went without actual apocalyptic catastrophe, blogging is a relic of the 90s that has managed to keep a firm hold within popular culture into the new century and beyond.

Even more impressively, having evolved from a simple means of self expression into a powerful marketing tool for businesses, intelligently applied blogs now drive web traffic, light up social media and offer a helping hand in painting elaborate pictures of brand identities the world over.

It might be easy to overlook the benefits of adding a blog to your marketing arsenal, but in doing so you’d certainly be missing a trick! Indeed, it can be exactly the step that springboards your business towards a steady flow of website traffic and a healthily expanding customer base. Here, we will break down some of the ins and outs of what makes blogging so effective.

Crafting Your Brand Identity

What is it that makes a brand jump into our consciousness and earn our loyalty? Take a moment to think of your favourite go-to brands and pick a few words that you would use to describe each one. Perhaps adjectives such as ethical and trustworthy, vibrant and fun, or sophisticated and modern come to mind?

Communicating a sense of what a business is all about – its ethos, mission statement, and moral compass – is a hugely effective way of connecting with potential customers, and this process is known as building a brand identity. When done well, a customer will not only be buying the product in their shopping basket, but also into an idea. In this case, they are investing in the way that the brand in question makes them feel, and how that aligns with their sense of self – alongside a product they can believe in, of course!

As a business owner, conveying who you are and what you believe in will allow you to build trust and connection with your customer base. As you cover topics within your area of expertise you will build your authority in the eyes of your readers, not to mention giving yourself a nifty repository of information to direct customers towards! This magic combination of who you are and what you know will contribute towards a brand identity that makes you the obvious choice for those seeking your product or service.

The Delicate Balance Of Relevancy

The modern internet user has become fantastically handy at quickly scanning what they see online, before scrolling past, clicking on, or blocking out content. Being relegated to the blocked list on social media platforms is certainly not the goal, but navigating the algorithms of these websites means posting relatively frequently, so a little fancy footwork must be performed to remain in the sweet spot that makes us a noticeable, yet welcome feature in someone’s feed. Studies suggest an optimal post rate on Facebook of 3-7 times per week, and a slightly mind-boggling 15 times per day on Twitter. So how do we achieve this?

Fundamentally, unless someone has already decided to buy what you are offering, internet users are looking for content that entertains or informs them. Well written blogs allow us to grab attention in a far more authentic way than product posts or conventional advertising alone. Compelling articles with a novel angle, a personal story, or a useful or fascinating core of information are a wonderful vehicle for stimulating interest, and reminding readers about the great brand behind them!

An Investment For The Future

Investing in a conventional advertising campaign can certainly be effective in reaching a wider audience, but in terms of bang for buck, the benefits we reap from our investment only last as long as the campaign is in circulation. In contrast, the great thing about blogs is that once you’ve published a blog on your website and shared a link to it on social media, its work is only just beginning.

Informative blogs can bring traffic through Google searches, while interesting or amusing topics can have viral reach as people share them with their friends, colleagues or loved ones. Blogs appearing on social media invite dialogue between readers, giving valuable feedback and opinions. This offers fantastic insight into your potential customer base, and a great opportunity to learn about what works well, or where you can go back to the drawing board.

Not every blog will be a big hit, but those that are successful have the potential to draw visitors for months or even years ahead. The whole package will allow readers to develop an understanding of what you do, making interactions far more rewarding when they do transition from leads into customers, for you as well as your customers.

As your catalogue of blogs continues to build, you will have a fantastic stash of content to circulate on your social media platforms at reasonable intervals, which can be interspersed with product links, visual posts, content from elsewhere on the web, and so on. Diversity is the spice of life, as they say!

Increasing Search Engine Optimisation

Authority perceived by potential customers is not the only type we seek. Achieving authority in the eyes of Google and other search engines is an important puzzle piece when it comes to establishing a successful foothold within the online marketplace. “Authority” in this sense means that a search engine perceives your website as a good source of valid, high-quality content that will be useful to the search engine’s users. Each search engine is, after all, also seeking to build a trusting rapport with its visitors too.

All sorts of factors, such as the security of your website, its loading speed, its adaptability to different device screens, incoming and outgoing links, right through to the quality of the text within it, will all affect your SEO ranking. At this point in the game, adding a beautifully crafted blog to your website also has a useful role to play.

Your latest fascinating dispatch will offer a new page for Google’s bots to crawl and index, increasing the pool of keywords that might draw traffic to your site and offering content that is considered “fresh”. Google has experimented over the years with the concept of freshness, as it continues to hunt out the best possible search results.

How your new blog will impact SEO is influenced by complex algorithms that are tough to second-guess and even trickier to fool. In fact, Google works very hard to exclude websites that try to cheat their algorithms, so aiming to do things properly is a much brighter idea than trying to be sneaky!

For a zesty level of freshness, adding new pages to your website in the form of blogs can certainly bolster your ranking, as can publishing content which is considered relevant to an on-trend topic. Incoming links from social media, and other online sources, will increase the bearing of your website in the eyes of search engines too which means re-posting an older blog will give it a renewed boost on various virtual radars. In terms of the long goal, a great series of blogs will begin to provide you with a predictable and steady flow of traffic, filled with potential!

Transforming Leads Into Sales

It is certainly exciting watching your website traffic increase, but the million dollar question is how do we translate those visitors into actual customers? Beyond making sure that what your business has to offer is absolutely on point and fantastically presented, you can provide friendly nudges in the forms of “calls to action” within each blog.

This means weaving appealing prompts into each post to do things like subscribe to a newsletter, hit like on social media, visit a product page, enter a competition or redeem a coupon. Join the dots on your reader’s behalf by thoughtfully interspersing blogs that are relevant to certain products or portfolios with links to directly access the brilliant things you’ve just told that reader about.

In this endeavour, know that only a proportion of your readers will take the plunge into your client base, and that’s perfectly normal. Every visitor acts as a conduit to potential leads: whether they share your post on social media, or send a link to a friend who then becomes a customer themselves; whether they buy your product straight away, or find themselves repeatedly navigating back for another peek (we’ve all been there!) until they buy next year.

By going through this process with integrity – delivering a fantastic product, building a trustworthy brand identity, developing a multi-directional relationship with your social media communities, learning from each thing you put out there, and increasing the authority of your website – you can build a solid foundation upon which your business can grow.

As a matter of point, just as a great blog can be re-visited, word has it that Tamagotchis are making an impressive come-back. I suppose there are few things more magnetic than a compelling idea!