For as long as I’ve been running my business, I’ve been a huge supporter of having a blog and a newsletter for your business. Whether you have a small product-based business or run an international empire, writing content for your business can help establish your credibility when you post on social media.

Before we get into why I think you should have a blog for your business, I want to say that I totally understand how hard it can be to come up with content all the time for social media. I was in the same boat for the first 4 years of my business before I hired a Content Manager to take over content editing and distribution for my business. If working with someone isn’t where you’re at yet, make sure to bookmark this post about batch working to make writing regularly easy.

1. Show up as an expert in your industry

These days, anyone can add a job title to their LinkedIn and claim to be in your industry—so, understandably, most of your audience will want proof you know what you’re doing.

Having a blog means you have a place to show off your expertise regularly on a platform that you own. When people come to your website to see what you offer, they can go through your blog posts and see that you have the background knowledge required to help them.

Yes, some topics you’ll write about aren’t new. But the ideas and principles are coming from you, in your voice. People that already follow you will love seeing your opinions in a longer format, and for the people that don’t already follow you, this is an opportunity for them to discover you via a google search, social media and from your current fans sharing it with their followers.

Regardless of your industry, you can always use your blog to educate, inform, entertain and, of course, sell to current or potential clients.

2. Search Engine Optimization

You’ve probably heard about Search Engine Optimization or SEO if you’ve been in business for a little while. Over the years, SEO has gotten more and more complicated, but at least this remains the same: having a blog gives you more pages to optimze for SEO.

You see, SEO is something that you build over time. You build it by understanding what your ideal customer might search for and writing content to answer their questions. When you set up a blog, you’re investing time into being found in search results.

Pair that with sharing your posts directly to your Google business page, and you’ll see your traffic increase in no time.

3. Write it once, use it a dozen times

Many clients and students come to me wondering what they should post on social media. And I get it; coming up with new things to post about is hard, especially when you need to create videos, images, stories and more.

When you invest in a blog for your business, you suddenly have a pool of content and ideas to pull from. A single blog post can be turned into:

Quote images on Instagram in your own words
Text tweets
Answers to questions on Reddit or Quora
Quotes you can include in PR pitches
Scripts for video content
Steps to an email challenge
Outlines for an online course
Podcast topics

This means that the extra time it takes to create blog posts will actually save you time when it comes to posting online.

4. Make your content last

Speaking of time investment, it’s a simple fact that when you’re posting on social media, the life of your content is shorter. Each platform has an amount of time you can expect your audience to see your content. Facebook might circulate it for a couple of days, but platforms like Twitter can be as little as 15 seconds.

When you blog about topics that don’t have a specific shelf life to them (aka Evergreen content), then you can share that blog over and over for months, if not years.

You shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel to present yourself as an expert on your website and social media feeds, so write about things that are always relevant in your industry and use that to fill your content calendar for months to come.

5. Increase sales

Social media is not all about sales, so I added this as the last reason. When building an engaged community online, you should educate, entertain and inform your followers first—and sales will follow.

That said, if people don’t know what you offer, they won’t buy from you or hire you.

Having a blog and using the content from your blog to post online regularly is the easiest way to increase your sales without investing even more time into direct outreach.

All those blogs you write should drive your audience toward contact forms, product pages, freebies, etc. so you can have your website working for your business.

Make your website work harder

In conclusion, If you don’t have a blog, or have one but not using it, you’re losing money!

When properly done, your blog is like a 24/7/365 sales funnel that can provide valuable information and insights that help new clients make the decision to follow you and, in the end, purchase your products/services.

You wouldn’t have a shop open to the public without staff to answer any questions, so why have a website that doesn’t have a blog to share your insights?

Still not sure how you could use a blog in your content strategy? Click here to book a 1:1 consult to come up with a list of topics you should be talking about online.

5 Benefits Of Blogging For Business