Every website should be educational vs just promotional.
A lot of companies are turned off by the thought of using a blog because they are concerned about the amount of time that it will take up while offering little return. A blog is simply a mechanism for archiving educational content and it’s the best tool on your website to organize content for web visitors.
If you are looking for 1 marketing task to focus on right now – start blogging.
10 Reasons to Blog During COVID-19
1. A Blog Turns Your Site into an Educational Tool
The majority of web visitors coming to your website aren’t ready to convert immediately. During that first visit, they are typically in the early stages of a sales cycle and are focused on research.
A blog or resource area turns your website into an educational resource, helping a visitor get a step closer to contacting your team.
Trust and credibility are also a critical component to conversion. One of the best ways to present your business as a credible expert is to actively post about industry trends, common questions, and helpful resources.
2. Blog Content Fuels Other Marketing Channels
While you’ll want to evaluate several marketing channels, blogging is one of the best long-term strategies.
If you are reevaluating your marketing budget due to COVID-19, consider focusing on blogging as it is a relatively low-cost investment and blog content fuels other marketing.
Blog content can be utilized in website opt-ins, paid advertisement campaigns, email marketing, and social media, in addition to SEO.
3. Blogging Increases Website Traffic
When people are doing research online, they’ll often start by searching long-tail keywords. Blog posts typically rank at the top of the search engines for these keywords.
Blog posts, especially long-form content, give your site more opportunities to rank for different keywords, which in turn will drive more traffic.
Domain authority is also an important factor for SEO. Adding more content to your site with blog posts can increase your website’s domain authority and present the site as a resource for common questions, in the algorithms of the search engines.
4. Blogging Produces Great Sales Resources
A lot of outside sales and B2B sales are shifting to all digital interactions, due to COVID-19. Blog content can also be a great resource for your sales team.
During the sales process, you may not want to spend your limited time, explaining every industry term to a prospect. Instead, if a potential client has questions about a specific aspect of your service, you can share an informative blog post on the topic. This approach also presents your business as an authority in your field.
Also, case studies, industry reports, or recognitions on your website can be great resources that salespeople can share while trying to close a new deal.
5. Blogging Builds Brand Awareness
During this uncertain time, the brands and companies that are connecting with customers in meaningful ways are building goodwill and brand loyalty.
An active blog on your website can also demonstrate your brand’s credibility to partners and affiliates in your industry. If you are actively blogging on your own website, you may also consider posting guest blog posts on other sites and contributing to large content sites.
When applying to content sites as a guest blogger, you’ll need to provide links to previous articles published online. Your past blog content is perfect for that.
6. Blog Content Supports Email Marketing
Right now, a lot of companies are postponing large investments or putting off decisions due to the coronavirus.
Email marketing is a great way to stay top of mind with your potential and existing customers. Most email newsletters are educational and not focused on promotions or sales campaigns.
You can utilize your recent blog posts as content for each newsletter. In the email newsletter itself, you typically want to reduce the amount of content to a few paragraphs. A great strategy is to provide a short snippet of the blog post and then add a link to the full post on your website.
7. A Blog Becomes an Internal Knowledge Base
As many companies shift to remote work permanently or for the next several months, their on-boarding and training process for new hires is also changing to digital formats.
Training employees remotely requires a lot of preparation and training content or manuals. Blogging on industry trends and topics also produces great content for employees and future employees.
A blog can serve as an internal knowledge base for new hires.
8. Blogging is Essential for Social Media
In the last few months, people are spending a higher percentage of time on social media platforms.
If your company isn’t active on social media, this is the best time to start. Blogging can be a great resource for content to share on social media. Every blog post, whether text or video, can be repurposed for social media and shared on your company’s social media platforms.
Video content performs better on social media, so all of your video blogs can be uploaded directly to and shared on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram as well.
9. Blogging Encourages Link Building
Link building is important for domain authority and search engine optimization. Even if you aren’t engaged with an SEO company right now, you can still focus on building links by blogging.
Your website’s own domain authority increases as you get more links from high-quality websites, and companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites.
Publishing interesting blog content can natively help draw links from other sites. You can also build up on-page links with blog content.
WordPress plugins like Yoast or All-in-one SEO are great tools for doing basic optimization of your blog posts. They can guide you in setting up some internal links between different blog posts
10. Blogging isn’t going away
While there is a lot of uncertainty right now, blogging has been a staple of the Internet for over 20 years now.
While almost everything else has changed in the website design and digital marketing world, blogging continues to get results. In a 2018 survey, 55% of marketers say blogging is their top inbound marketing priority.
It’s doubtful that blog content will be out of fashion soon. Content marketing continues to be an effective strategy and blogging plays an important role in any content marketing campaigns.
