13 Reasons Your Business Needs a Blog

1. Attract an audience

Every business needs traffic, whether this is foot traffic in a high street store or ‘eyeballs’ to an online store. A good blog not only generates traffic, but also helps retain that traffic, keeping people coming back and growing in loyalty.

2. Inform, interact and learn from your audience

Informed and educated visitors become confident, loyal customers. More people are turning to the internet to research before they buy. You can position your company as a go-to resource, thereby winning more business. Plus, with blogging, information flows both ways. You can gain insights into your customers’ minds, their needs, challenges and preferences. Comments, feedback forms, surveys and polls become instant, spontaneous market research tools. It’s like working with a free focus group that tells you which products you should create and why.

3. Retain your audience

Too many marketers focus on gaining initial visibility through advertising or attention-seeking stunts. If that tactic does not convert into instant sales, the budget and effort are wasted. With a blog you can hold prospects’ interest for longer, winning customers round over time, and bringing them back to hear from you long after their first contact. No need for spammy, desperate-sounding sales messages.

4. Energize your audience

Even better than a growing, loyal audience is a growing, loyal audience that takes action. A blog can motivate your visitors to do things. All you need is copy that warms them up, a motivating story and a clear call to action.

5. Recruit help, contacts, employees

Why spend thousands on recruitment consultants and advertising when you have the best recruitment mechanism at your fingertips? Your blog audience is the most likely to respond and the most likely to be appropriate future employees and networking contacts.

6. Respond to stories and customers

Customer service and public relations have never been more important; a bad story can spread around the web’s social networks at speed. Your blog becomes a responsive outlet to explain your side of any story and douse the fires of negative activity.

7. Links for direct traffic

You can’t beat valuable, authoritative content for attracting links from other websites, forums, discussion lists and social networks. These links bring a quantity of attention, as well as quality, targeted visitors that turn into good leads.

8. Links for SEO

As well as the direct traffic benefit of leads, links are important in bringing in search visitors. The more linkable your website, the better your search results will be. Very often traditional websites are difficult to link to and not easy for search engines to index. This can be due to the website’s structure, the software it’s built with, or its overly complex URLs. Blogs are almost always superior in this respect.

9. Building trust and familiarity

Trust is vital in making sales and important for encouraging visitors to opt into your lead-generation process. By starting with compelling information and resources, and by encouraging repeat communication, you build familiarity. Over time, this creates a strong bond of trust, making sales so much easier.

10. Branding

This positive attention and these value-based, long-term experiences don’t just create trust. They help to create a stronger, better brand. This leads to word-of-mouth advertising, which is one of the best forms of promotion you can get.

11. Grow a community

Through discussion, interaction and comments, you can help forge a sense of community that can be strengthened both online and off.

12. Offer better service

Your blog provides multiple routes for customers and prospects to get in touch. It can show your human, approachable side, allow better customer interaction, and improve customer service.

13. Initiate more sales

Article taken from:  http://www.wordtracker.com

P.S.  Please leave comments; they would be greatly appreciated.

June Pereira

• Biography of the Author(Read Below)..
• Latest Posts (view them )..

June Pereira

Please allow me to introduce or reintroduce myself. I am June Pereira. I was born in Santa Cruz, Trinidad, West Indies and today I live in a beautiful home in a borough/county here in my country which is called Arima. My upbringing has done a lot for me especially with the values my parents, especially my mom, instilled in me from a very young age. In my country, our schooling system is made up of primary, secondary and tertiary/university, etc. Fortunately for me, I have been through primary, secondary and tertiary. Whilst I may not be a university graduate, I did do my medical transcription at our Medical Data Campus, here in Trinidad. My education also includes learning a “trade” which is one of making jewellery; yes, making precious jewellery. I did that for a while, for about 7 years, and then “branched off” into managing a jewellery shop in one of our finest and oldest shopping malls here at home. Whilst working in this capacity, I was very fortunate to meet some very interesting people from “around the world,” including the author of “The Making of The West Indies,” (a history book I used in secondary school) Professor Fitzroy Richard Augier from Jamaica. Somehow, I ended up studying medical transcription in 2005. Those 7 months of studying medical transcription were some of the most stressful times in my life. I was in my early 40s then and had just acquired my first home and exams were coming to me like “crazy.” But I managed to complete that course and was very successful in doing so. I then went on to work from home as a medical transcriptionist (still doing so to date) and soon began to think about working as an online marketer, affiliate marketer or anything online that afforded me the opportunity to work for myself. I started to become more and more curious about that and around 2009, I started to “investigate” and “check out” things online. The first multilevel marketing company I joined was Strong Future International. At that time, I had no idea what I was doing and I had to learn everything about safelist marketing, traffic exchanges, traffic ad exchanges, etc. I then got involved with Global NPN through my upline James Caldwell and he and his upline, Edwin Watford, have assisted my quite tremendously over the last 2 years and they are still working online and helping me every day up to the time this of writing this. Luckily for me as well, I have always been able to depend on Geoff Stephen, the owner of Global NPN, who is someone I can always count on to answer questions when I ask. I still have a lot to learn and I am willing and ready to work with any persons who want to work with me. I plan to quit medical transcription in the near future and focus more on online marketing be it MLM, traffic exchanges, safelist marketing or a combination of some things. I would like for the person/s reading my blog to follow me on twitter. My username for Twitter is: junebuenavista. My Skype username (if you need it) is: sweetoman.

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