How blogging positively impacts sales

The CEO sitting next to me the other day heads a very successful company. She understands marketing and gets social media. But when the subject of blogging came up, she went down an interesting path.

 

“I still don’t get why we need to blog. Who’s going to visit our Web site to read our blog? On top of that, we're real busy and don’t have a lot of extra time to write content consistently. I don’t want to start and stop; that’s worse than never starting. So why is blogging so critical?”

 

She may appear to have a good point. After all, some 175,000 blogs are created daily. Technorati estimates the number of blogs at 113 million (with 7.5 million of them active). 184 million bloggers are creating 570,000 posts every 24 hours, reaching 70 percent of Web surfers daily.

 

With all this blogging going on – and the mind-numbing reality of 175,000 new blogs coming to life daily – why is it so important?

 

We’ve all heard the litany of high-level reasons why companies should blog, including:

 

I knew the CEO next to me had heard this stuff before. So I didn’t go there. Knowing she was a pragmatic, revenue-enhancing, lead generating type, I talked, instead, about the correlation between blogging and sales (something you don’t hear enough about).

 

 

Before explaining how blogging plays a central role in generating sales leads, I emphasized the need to get search engine optimization (SEO) right. That’s where the journey should begin. SEO and blogging go together; they're buddies. Once the SEO foundation is laid, a company can move forward with blogging which is one of the best ways to create pages that are keyword dense and optimized.

 

If you write compelling content that people naturally search for, they will discover you, visit your site, probe and (hopefully) become engaged. Just don’t make the mistake of writing myopically about your company, products, services and promotions. Build a higher-level voice based on topics people (who don’t know you) will search for. Whereas the majority of Web site content is static, blogs are alive with fluid, current thinking.  

 

Remember that blogging isn’t an occasional thing; you need to do it often enough to build an authentic voice and aura of authority. That typically means daily or at least weekly. Nothing looks worse than a withering blog without a post for weeks or months. 

Blogs directly impact sales because they drive traffic back to your blogs and Web site, including traffic from referring Web sites. They're one of the best ways to increase linkage (links) which is critical to broadening readership.

Another way blogs can stimulate sales is by gathering periodic "best of" compilations. Select 4-5 of your company's best posts and send them to a targeted e-mail list and social networks (LinkedIn and Facebook are good places to start). This way the content they may have missed by not searching or visiting your web site is delivered to their desktop. Do this every month or every other month to create a consistent flow. And don’t forget to tweet your blog posts.

My CEO friend asked one more question: “Does it matter that our company isn’t selling our products and services online?” I told her it doesn’t; we’re talking apples and oranges. Even if you’re not selling online, people are finding you online.

Thanks to search, the function of marketing shifted (awhile ago) from one-way push to many-to-many pull. Now, thankfully, a direct connection occurs, and it’s coming bottom-up - from prospects, customers, friends, fans, etc. - vs. top-down.