Does my company need to blog?

3 ways blogging can boost your brand

Most companies want to focus on the operation of their business rather than on a blog. Dishing out valuable content consistently is a tall order when you’re also servicing clients, creating products, balancing accounts and shipping orders. Is having a blog worth the effort, and does it offer a financial benefit? The answer, for most businesses anyway, is yes.

The most-followed blogs share a few things in common: passion, patience and expertise. Successful blog posts aren’t just filled with humor or opinion. Most of them contain useful, informational or educational content and even, perhaps, solve a problem. Using this formula, thriving bloggers gain immediate credibility, promote themselves and their brands, increase SEO for their websites and position themselves as experts of what they write. Keep in mind that you should approach blogging with an eye on commitment. It makes little sense to create a blog, post four times and never touch it again. However, if you consistently post quality content (writing, photos, videos, infographics), your blog will begin to positively impact your business in the following ways:

Strengthen search engine optimization (SEO).

This elusive and ever-changing algorithm often causes many marketers to pull out their hair. It’s important to know that search engines aren’t exclusively about keywords any longer. In fact, the evolution of SEO is now on valuable and consistent content. Publishing a blog post once a month is OK, but publishing valuable content (keyword-rich, informative/educational, successfully cross- and back-linked) on a consistent basis (weekly over a period of a year) will further improve the SEO of your website and integrated blog.

Get noticed/add credibility.

As if improving SEO wasn’t enough of a reason, by having a blog, you can strongly position yourself as an expert to readers. Categorizing blog posts based on subject matter and offering multiple posts in those categories will help your company appear at the top of generic searches as well. When people click on your blog, they also reach your website through which they can learn more about your product or service. Blogs add credibility to your business by proving that you aren’t just a static website, but a dynamic business that provides useful information for everyone, not just potential customers.

Provide a vehicle for collaboration/virtual networking.

For those unfamiliar with the world of blogging, a way to lighten some of the responsibility of weekly blog posts is to invite guests to share content on your blog. Perhaps you have a group of experts with whom you collaborate. To offset some of the responsibility of curating your own content, invite others whom you respect and trust to add their own content. For example, if you have a blog about baking, you can invite expert cake decorators, sugar artists, bread bakers, representatives from flour companies, etc. to share insider secrets, recipes and ideas on your site. This form of collaboration not only relieves some of the content burden, but may also provide collaborative guest-blogging opportunities for you, which further extends your brand to all readers who follow the blogs with whom you collaborate. It’s a win-win form of cross-pollinating expertise through both collaboration and virtual networking.

Blogging may seem like a huge time-suck, yet marketing techniques are now focused more on drawing interest rather than broadly (and loudly) preaching. Blogs provide one such form of inbound marketing that gives users the ability to search for and find the experts. Should you want to begin, refresh or even reinvent your business blog, Axia Public Relations can teach you more about inbound marketing practices to ensure your blog is doing all that you want it to do. Contact us when you are ready to begin or simply download our e-book Maximizing Your Public Relations Investment to learn about the many services Axia Public Relations provides to help businesses draw interest.

Wendy Bulawa Agudelo has nearly 20 years of experience in technology, business, consumer and nonprofit public relations. She serves on the Massachusetts Down Syndrome Congress PR Task Force and is a culinary enthusiast and champion for the special needs community. Wendy has worked for Axia Public Relations since September 2014. Learn more about Wendy Bulawa