Over the next few months I will be writing a comprehensive set of posts on the topic of blogging for business.
These will be put under a new category in the blog called ‘Content Marketing‘ which is all about creating great content and building authority in your industry.
Let’s kick things off with a post on why businesses should blog.
Why blog
There are 3 things that are you almost guaranteed to get as a result of a well executed strategy to start blogging.
- You will get more traffic to your site (see companies that blog get 55% more traffic).
- Your site will be seen as a higher authority by Google (to summarise this check out SEOMoz’s ranking factors and future SEO report – better content leads to more links, more useful site, higher social media following etc) and you will be elevated in the search results and therefore get more traffic.
- You and your business will be seen as a trusted authority by people including potential customers and referrers (build a following and become known as the expert)
From a business point of view I’d summarise these as follows:
Blogging will deliver you more online leads (traffic) and more offline leads (general authority) and give you a bigger group of people to market to which will result in more customers.
In essence the purpose of blogging for business is about getting more customers.
My experience
This is how my site looked before I swapped it to a blog in 2010. It was actually pretty effective but it was sliding down the rankings in Google and I couldn't see how I could continue competing against bigger companies with a sales page type site.
We have been using 
