If you have a website, you probably have a blog, too. Most businesses use these blogs to post updates about that business and nothing else. And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, why bother having an entire blog to play the same role that your social media accounts play much, much better? Your blog is not just supposed to be a place to put a post about your new product or service. It’s also a place to post informative, engaging content that your target audience will find and which will draw them to your product and service. Here are just some of the ways that a high content blog improves your sales:

It Actively Attracts People to Your Website

The entire point of having a website is to act as an online salesman for your business. But how to you bring people to that website, especially if you are a smaller business that does not already have a following? One of the best ways is with a blog. A blog is an opportunity to post content of all kinds that is relevant to your business. It draws your audience in and then diverts them to your website. How? Think about how you surf the web. Along with actively seeking out specific websites, like BuzzFeed and Facebook, you type search queries in search engines to get information, usually from blogs or websites.

Your blog and website could be among those search results, if you had a high content, high quality blog that provided information that was relevant to your industry. You could be exposing a wider pool of people to your business, if you were actively posting blogs that were interesting and which were search engine optimized.

A blog that is properly search engine optimized is, just alone, another great way to attract people to your website. Google and search engines like it love a website with a blog. A blog serves a wide variety of search engine optimization functions, the best of which being constantly refreshing your content, providing opportunities for keyword use, and building authority.

Not only will you simply be listed in more search results, you’ll start to become a hub of information related to your industry, which ensures that not only will people find you once, but they will remember you and continue to return to you again and again. As times goes on, you will gain a more and more prominent place in the search results, which in turn, only brings more and more people to your website.

 

Allows You to Target Your Specific Audience

There is only so much targeting that can be done with just the content on your website and your PPC campaigns. With a high content blog, you have a much greater and wider opportunity to target your specific audience. Search results themselves can be fairly broad, but the more content you have on your blog, the more effectively it can reach out to the kind of people you want to reach. Your blog does for your website what your social media posts do for your accounts. It tailors your web presence for a certain kind of user, making you easier to find and more agreeable to that user.

Your blog is an opportunity to create tailored content that your audience will actually want to read and will respond to. They’ll find it, they’ll read, it, and they’ll respond to it, making them much more likely to actually want to do business with you. You’ll have already built a foundation with that specific customer. They’ll already know, like, and trust you. You will have bridged the most difficult gap between business and customer and they’ll be ready to buy.

 

Generate More Leads

Actually getting people to read what you write is the hardest part of the process. When someone comes to your blog, however, they are much more likely to become a lead than if they come cold onto your website. Using calls to action on your blog can be a great way to help turn your readers into leads. First, though, you have to build your relationship with them.

This is where a content-rich blog really shines, especially when compared to a blog that only posts updates about products or services. Few people are actually going to be looking for that kind of content. Even fewer are going to read it. And it’s going to do almost nothing to build authority or a relationship of trust between your business and the reader. A blog that focuses on providing a lot of content, on the other hand, is one of the best ways to build a relationship.

Think about your own relationships with business. Do you like them just because of their products? Or do you trust them because they seem to be an authority in their field, because they actually seem to know what they’re talking about? Probably more of the latter. We rarely buy a product just because we like the product. We more often buy a product because we like the company itself. Your blog will help people get to that level with your business and then convert them into leads.