The first Owned track of the afternoon today was Badass Blogging: Best Practices to Enhance Your Customer Reach, by Jennifer Evans Cario. The thirty minute presentation focused on why blogs should still be an important part of your online strategy. Cario stated that many companies are moving more of their attention to social media because it is easier and faster to manage. However, blogging has many specific benefits that can exponentially help companies grow their online presence.
For instance, sites that have blogs within their website (not on an external site like blogspot) get 67% more leads, 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 437% more indexed pages. These are huge numbers which showcase the potential exposure a blog can give a website when it is properly maintained.
Key Blogging Benefits
When compared to basic content pages on a website, blogs are more insight focused, have greater editorial freedom, allow the business to showcase their personality, and allow for social sharing and conversations by readers. Companies should utilize these benefits by publishing and sharing their content on blog posts as well as via social media, news, and other outlets. This allows for conversation to build around the content, instead of publishing one-sided announcements that don’t allow for interaction with readers (who are also potential customers).
The majority of blog traffic is 80% new visitors and 20% loyalists who read the blog on a regular basis. Because new traffic is often coming directly to a blog post than a content page, there is more opportunity for fresher context and relevance to what the reader is interested in. Companies should capitalize on this by crafting content around what they offer in a non-salesy way.
Make Conversions as Easy as Possible
When compare to social media, only blogs allow you to work in several different types of content and media, meaning you can have a video, text, and photo, all in one post. This is great for marketers because they can have a call-to-action at the end of every post, which can translate into actual sales (instead of sharing a piece of media directly).
For instance, if a company posts a link on Twitter to their YouTube video, but don’t have a call-to-action or it is cut off in the video description, users are unable to buy the product mentioned. Make conversions as easy as possible by sharing your media in a blog post instead. Embed the YouTube video or other piece of content into a blog post, which can then include a link to the direct product page.
Main Session Takeaways
- Make conversions as easy as possible
- Push social traffic to your blog instead of another platform that doesn’t have a direct purchase link
- Sites that have blogs within their website (not on an external site like blogspot) get 67% more leads, 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 437% more indexed pages.
