Have you ever considered starting a blog or run one for your website? For many of you, the answer to this will either be ‘No’, or ‘Yes, but I don’t have time to post’. I want to ask you to spend 5 minutes with me today and I’ll show you what a regularly run blog can do for your business and how easy it is to post regularly, even with little time.
The story of Bill and his woeful website traffic (no business blog)
Bill (renamed for privacy reasons), a client of mine, runs a product-based business in the South East of England. He has an e-commerce website that he had designed on Wordpress. When we started working together he had about 500 page views a month, according to his Google Analytics. His competitors were averaging 30,000 to 40,000 views per month. His stats felt a drop in the ocean to where he wanted to be and he was crushed. He thought he had been sold down the river by his web designer.
The truth is, having your website designed for you with SEO is just the beginning, now you need to fill your website with useful content, primed to aid buying decisions and convert potential traffic into customers. The common misconception at this point is that if you spend more time on social media, you’ll gain more traffic. The reality is that it doesn’t work like that. Social media converts at less than 1% in most cases, so you spend a huge amount of time on creating fresh social posts and reaching new followers with very few results.
This is where blogging comes in. One blog post, carefully written, can generate traffic not just in the moment you post it, but for years to come. Here’s what that might look like for you;
Websites that also have a blog are shown to have 434% more indexed pages on search engines*
Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites*
Businesses that blog experience twice as much email traffic as businesses that don’t
Clients who have a regular blog post strategy have seen 300%+ more website traffic than those who don’t blog
Blog posts that contain a call to action button receive an average of 5.31% click-through rate**
Compare all of that to a 1% social media conversion rate and you can easily see why big companies spend a lot of time and focus on generating quality blog content.
I explained this to Bill and he gave me a shot to see what I could do.
How I changed Bill’s website traffic nightmare into a business blog party in 4 months!
Four months later and Bill’s monthly page views have gone from around 500 to 9,300, seeing an increase of 20% in revenue, which more than pays for my services. I am also on target to deliver his 20,000 views target by the end of year one. How have I achieved this? A fine balance between SEO targeted content that his clients want to consume and share, and creating those all-important time-saving efficient posts. This second type of post is what I want to talk you through today because it is a great place to start.
If you are like Bill and own either a product or a service-based business, each day you are likely to receive a number of emails asking the same questions. If you’ve been clever you have updated your product and service descriptions to answer these or have provided a clear set of FAQs somewhere on your site. The problem is that some of those questions have big answers, something you can’t easily put into 3 or 4 lines. So your FAQs summarise rather than fully fill in your client’s gap in understanding, hence the frequency of emails on a similar subject.
A blog post that answers one FAQ, in detail, can and will save you a serious amount of time answering these more complex questions. More than that if you link to the blog posts in your FAQs, product descriptions and even on social media you can guarantee to cut these unnecessary interactions by half. Not only that but you’ll see an increase in sales because people have had their questions answered.
If you can imagine a post like this takes 1-2 hours to write and once written is on your site forever, then how much time will you be saving over answering these same questions by email, day in and day out. Hours more I should imagine!
A blog post can also be repurposed saving you even more time and helping you outshine the competition online, which I will talk more about next time.
In conclusion, a business blog is far more valuable than you think
As business owners, we need our websites to act as sales agents for us. To do that we need to go mining for traffic on search engines, in a way that doesn’t have us tethered to our computer screens. Blogging is both more efficient and resourceful when it comes to results than any other type of digital marketing.
Investing 1-2 hours a week could see your traffic and sale increase as a result.
If you need a copywriter to create compelling copy, someone who understands how to reach your target customer, fill in the project brief form below!
References - * Optinmonster 2022 and ** Mixpanel 2022
