Chapter 2: How a Business Blog Can explode Yours Sales & Profit

Benefits From Blog and Explode Your Sales and Profits

Benefit 1 - Reach a Wider Audience

If you make your blog interesting enough to your target audience, you can use it to reach far more people than a static sales web site ever could. A blog works so well because it takes advantage of the fact that most people are searching for information online. They are not necessarily looking to buy something right away.
However, by providing people with valuable information you increase your credibility in the eye of your target audience. That will put you in an excellent position to convert your readers into paying customers or the very least make them aware of your products or services.
Many regular websites provide their visitors with useful information by adding informative articles to their sites but because a blog is so easy to update, it is very efficient tool for creating and presenting fresh content that your target audience is interested in. These frequent updates also attract a lot more repeat traffic than a static web site could.
Even if you have an offline business that doesn’t directly sell anything online, like a coffee shop or a movie theatre, a well written blog can also help to spread the word about your business and bring more foot traffic to your place of business.
A static web site would have difficulty attracting such attention from people returning again and again to read the latest update but that is what blog are made for.

Benefit 2 - Generate Better Search Engine Rankings

If you do business in the internet, whether by selling products online or by using the web to promote your offline store or services, you will need to make sure that your target audience can find your web site among the millions of others. One of the best ways is to make sure you can be found by people for what you have to look for is to show up at the top of the search results in the free search engines like Google and yahoo.
That’s why search engine optimization has become such a key internet strategy. Everyone wants to become the top of the free search engine rankings. This is especially important when you consider the fact that there are more than 200 millions searches on Google everyday.
A blog is an extremely effective tool to help you rise up the search engine ranking with a very little cost.
There are 3 main reasons why blog are an excellent tool for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):
Keywords: keywords are the words people use to search for information in the search engine. The more relevant keywords you have on your website or blog, the more chance you have to attract the people searching for those words.
Link: Short for hyperlinks, links are highlighted words or phrases that people can click to move from one blog to another or website to another. If popular blogs or websites link to your blog or website, the search engines will decide that your site is also popular and give you a boost up their rankings. f you have high traffic blog and you link your blog to your sales website, you can increase the search engine ranking of your website.
Fresh content: The third factor in how search engines rank your website is the freshness of your content. Google and other search engines want to provide web searchers with the most up-to-date and relevant content they can identify. That is why their technology is constantly gathering information about new web sites and updates to existing sites. The more frequently a site is update with fresh content, the more often the search engines will visit to index the pages and the better chance those pages will have of climbing higher in the rankings. Since a blog format allows you to add fresh content every day, a regular updated blog can give you yet another boost in the search engine rankings. Every blog post gets its own unique URL, therefore, the more you post the more you can increase your search engine ranking.

Benefit 3 - Boost Your Revenue

The ultimate goal of any business blog is to increase the profits of the business as a whole. A well managed blog can certainly provide a couple of additional revenue streams for your business. The most obvious being through the extra traffic a blog can drive to your online or offline store.

If your blog showcases new products and includes subtle marketing messages, you can drive people from your blog to the sales and product pages on your website with a little effort. As a result, you are able to close more sales. If you have an offline store, you can drive more traffic to it by showcasing your products and offers and generating interest and excitement on you blog.
The other potential revenue stream is third party advertising on your blog. As you now know, a good blog can attract significant volume of traffic. One benefit is that heavy traffic can make your blog attractive to advertisers. There are a couple of options available to you which we will cover later.

Benefit 4 - Develop Relationships with your Audience through Open Communication

Another great benefit of blog is that it allows you to develop a rapport with your visitors by posting advices, tips and updates on your products, services and industry as well as addressing any particular customer concerns or queries.

Benefit 5 - Build a Community of Interested Followers

Communicating with your customers through a blog can be completely one-way by you simply writing regular new updates or posting information of interest for your audiences to read. It can also be two-way, with you posting a topic and then allowing people to leave comments or ask questions.
The functions also provide another benefit with the ability to create a community of like minded people on a topic specific blog. By leaving comments, readers can interact with other people interested in the same things, as they would on an internet forum or message board.
Community building aspect of blog keeps people coming back to leave more comments or to view replies to their previous comments. The ease of open dialogue facilitated by blogging is a major factor in its huge rise in popularity as being able to discuss topics of interest with like minded people is very attractive to many internet users.
By allowing people to leave comments, you are encouraging discussions related to the topic of your website, which means that your blog site will be constantly updated with fresh new keywords related to your business, meaning better search engine ranking for you.

Benefit 6 - Humanize your Business to Let Your Potential Customers feel Comfortable buying from you

One of the major benefits of a blog is that it allows you to give your business a personal voice. Blogs answer the public’s cry for a less sanitised style of business/consumer interactions and let people know that there is a living, breathing person behind that website.
This personal touch helps to create trust which in turn can help to build a loyal customer base. This encourages repeat customers, builds your reputation and ultimately increases your overall sales and profits.
For small businesses, it is fairly easy to write in a personal way, write as if you are speaking with your customers in person. This approach has worked very well for small business, however large businesses and corporation have seen blogs as a perfect way to get in touch with their customers and present a more human image.

Benefit 7 - Establish Yourself as a Leading Expert in Your Industry

Establishing your credibility in the eyes of your target audience is a very important part of any business but particularly an online business. After all, with an offline business, anyone can walk in off the street and ask questions to gauge your expertise.
However, web business owners have to work much harder to build their credibility because they cannot reply on this personal contact.
Here again, a blog can be invaluable. Not only can it humanize your online business by allowing you to write in an informal style, but it also gives you the opportunity to write posts that position you as an expert. This is a technique commonly used by people who offer their services online, like writers, business coaches and public relations professionals.

Benefit 8 - Blogs Offer Easy to use, Cost Effective Web publishing and Content Management Tools

Another reason for the stratospheric rise of blogs is that they are so easy to set up and manage. People who may have previously been put off from building their own web sites because of worries about their level of technical knowledge jumped on blog as a way to create their own presence online and this led to an explosion in diary style blogging.
In addition to that, a business blog is just as cheap and easy to create as a personal diary style one.
Any business owners can set up an effective blog for between zero to ten dollars a month depending on the provider you use and how advanced you want your blog to be. You don’t need any programming knowledge to start and to maintain your own blog, and you can be up and running in minutes.
You can post your blog instantly. This allows you to update your readers and customers with important information as soon as you get it. This is to show them that you ahead of the game.
Additionally, the archiving feature that is common to blog software will automatically store all the contents that you had created allowing you to keep a history and group posts into categories
These will make blog great information resources for visitors to your website. Many good blogs also have search functions allowing visitors to find the topics that interest them most.
Whether you are a small business owner or the CEO of a large corporation, a blog can help you to achieve key objectives such as communicating more personally with your customers, reaching a wider audience online, boosting the search engine ranking for your website and selling more of your products and services.