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Sure, blogging affects SEO. In fact, we’ve touted the SEO benefits of blogging for a few years now.
But it’s more than an SEO tactic. Have you thought of the social proof aspect of blogging? Engagement with larger communities?
As important as blogging is to marketing and SEO, and as critical as revenue-generating tactics are, blogging goes beyond all that and helps you build a community, and reach new communities.
Impulse Creative articles get picked up and syndicated by content sharing sites, including Business 2 Community. Who is B2C? Here’s their mission statement:
Our mission is to create an open community where business professionals can establish their thought leadership, increase exposure for their business/organization, and network with others. We aim to provide a balanced view of the current business landscape based on industry news and trends, as well as the real-life experiences from our 10,000+ expert contributors. We are committed to continually providing new and innovative offerings (i.e. webcasts, whitepapers, site functionality, etc.) that enhance the experience for both our contributors and our audience.
Because of our regular content creation, coupled with this syndication, I’ve seen a major uptick in Twitter mentions from around the marketing and sales community. Check out this Twitter search for an example.
Plus, as you can see in the report below, this particular site has sent a fair amount of traffic that converts to contacts and brings people to our website for a relatively acceptable amount of time.
Want Referral Traffic? Blog!
Blogging is leading to referrals, engagement, social proof that we’re creating shareable content, and sending all these signals to the community.
As you can see in this other image, a recent article has propelled me to the top of the most-shared contributors list this week. On a well-trafficked site, this brings social proof for me as a contributor, and Impulse Creative as a brand. It’s more than SEO.
We also hear in the world that text is dead, and video & audio are the next revolution.
Certainly we agree that audio is up and coming (we have several podcasts at Impulse Creative) and we’re big proponents of video (our company and Sprocket Talk both push a LOT of video!). But we also understand that you can’t always watch video or listen to something. Sometimes you just need to read.
Whether you’re in a noisy room or in a public bathroom (come on, you know you’re on your phone in there) and you don’t have ear buds, or you’re just trying to consume words to increase your learning (it’s better according to research), there really are times when reading is just what you need. Which means as businesses, we need to create written content along with the other media we want our prospects to consume.
Reading isn’t Dead (Yet)
With that said, blogging fills that need to create written content. And it helps to create a connection with our audience. Video is passive. Reading is active. Active interaction tends to deepen those relationships we’re working to cultivate in marketing.
Another benefit to blogging? It helps you organize your thoughts and learn about your own business and industry. When you’re writing, you teach yourself what you don’t know and articulate what you do know – to yourself and to others.
When you begin writing a blog article, you have to organize your thoughts. If there are any gaps in the topic that you are writing about, you will have to learn about it. That’s why writing out and articulating your thoughts is a great way to internalize something you’ve learned or experienced. It helps you become more familiar with the topic you’re writing about.
Plus you establish yourself as an industry expert – and that has nothing to do with SEO, at least not directly. Your blog articles demonstrate your expertise in your niche. By sharing high-quality and relevant information with your readers, which they are more likely to share with others to be a thought leader in their own spaces, you become known as a go-to resource. You’re the one who provides consistent and useful information to help your readers learn about new tools and resources, solve tough challenges and advance their own businesses.
Blog Benefit: Human Connection (Really!)
Finally, going beyond SEO, blogging helps you develop a community and create valuable human connections.
One of the best parts of a successful business blog is the communication, collaboration and sharing that can take place in the comments on the article and in the social media posts related to it.
Facilitating active comments areas through the blog and social media by posting and responding to comments can help you create a community with shared interests. You’ll also learn a great deal about your audience in the process.
Plus these interactions can develop into truly human interactions, developing real relationships with potential clients, partners, contributors, brand ambassadors and more. By having a blog to fuel it, you’re using your website as the home base for developing true business relationships.
While blogging certainly helps search engines find your content to serve up to the searching public, which is the root of SEO, they go beyond that one strategy. Blogging helps you establish authority, develop a community, connect with humans, increase social proof of your brand, and more.
And it’s all still done with the written word. Include video and audio and imagery in your blogs, but keep using the text-based technology to connect with users well into the future of business growth and marketing.
