Blogging and your ROI: 5 Reasons to Start Your Business Blog Today

Having a blog for business is as important as having a business website. The good news is that earning ROI can be amazingly achievable, given a blogs’ low-cost entry point. A small business can often start a blog by simply taking the added time to write. We cannot assume that writing a blog is free, but its returns are easily measurable. A business blog can serve and facilitate many beneficial functions for any business. Most certainly, a well-crafted blog can improve your position and secure a marketing relationship at the top of the sales funnel. It’s an enviable position to own.

The fact is, as consumers, we love blogs! Just like we love reading customer reviews on Amazon or YELP when deliberating over an important purchase. It is further believed that there are 600 million+ blogs online today. Looking at it from a user perspective, U.S. internet users spend 3X more time on blogs than they do on email. People actually view over 20 billion blog pages each month, according to digital research firm Stratabeat, titled B2B Content Marketing 2020: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.

So here are 5 Reasons to Start Your Business Blog Today

A blog boosts your website and SEO.

In time, the more you blog, the more relevant your blog becomes to search engines. This means your brand may become more relevant in organic search as customers search or browse over keywords that may be anchored in your blog posts will improve the opportunities to have free ‘discovery’ of your site or products. Even though many large companies have comprehensive content management systems, blogs, and websites, many big companies attempt to automate their content, and its content appears to be impersonal. An active, authentic blog can cut through the clutter, even from the big brands, many times earning you a chance to earn some new business.

Endear Your Brand, Endear Your Products, Endear Your Personality

Blogs enable you to create in-depth explanations or new customer relationships that can, over time, not only allow you to get a new customer for your company but perhaps even make a consumer advocate for your product. In a fast-paced world of fast ads, gimmicks, and clickbait, consumers have become skeptical about purchasing decisions. A blog can slow down the process for those consumers who want to make a good decision. A blog can control the narrative and appeal to consumers at a different level by developing a relationship through blog storytelling that can be full of facts about the true value of your goods or services. And most importantly, a well-crafted blog can create a new persona or personality for your business that consumers may find refreshing or reassuring.

Blogs Provide Links for Social Boost and Product Exposure

Blogging is an easy way to increase your visibility on social media too. How? With each blog post, you can link access to all your social media pages with an embedded hyperlink within your article and even link to specific pages on your website. This gives consumers easy access and sharing capabilities that people can quickly send on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This increases the company’s exposure to audiences you might not have ever reached before.

Become an Industry Expert

By blogging on an external website, or even your company website, you can begin to establish yourself as THE expert, THE thought-leader, THE trendsetter in your business profession. When you look around at your competition, do they blog? Likely, they do not, or you may find that they don’t blog well. This is a competitive opportunity to do one tiny thing much better than your competition. Blogging can be a big-time competitive edge.

Your ROI

Again, writing a blog costs very little if you can write and post them to your website. But to truly calculate your blogging ROI, you should assess all of blog-building actions and associated costs versus the benefits, and ultimately, the returns. Costs may include:

• Fees for those involved in managing, writing, designing and editing for the blog.
• Costs for content management, web development, and creative software.

When you have assessed costs, you can now compare them against your returns. Using certain metrics can aid you in having a clear understanding of a blog’s value in relation to its cost. Here are a few metrics to consider using in your blogging ROI calculations:

• Lead Generation
• Sales
• Blog Subscriptions
• Organic Traffic
• “New” Unique Site Visitors
• Customer Engagement
• Social Shares

Whether you’re looking to generate leads, increase sales or simply to seed top-of-the-funnel expansion, the bottom line is: the ROI of blogging is undeniable—blogs are fun, affordable in most instances and the additional value you give your potential customers can pay big returns.

Philip Gabbard is a partner at Fat Unicorn Society, El Paso’s leading digital media company. In addition, Philip is an author, speaker, and multi-media thought-leader. For questions or comments, contact Philip at philip@philipgabbard.com.