Now this is a well-worn subject, having to discuss the benefits of blogging for businesses. But this blog post is written from my own unique perspective in over twenty years of blog writing with commercial success.
TL;DR
- Blogs Still Work: Blogging remains effective for businesses, even 20 years after it came about.
- Blogging Boosts Traffic: Blog writing helps to increase your website traffic and visibility.
- Writing Blogs Builds Authority: Blogging establishes your brand as an expert in your field.
- Generates Leads: Blog posts can directly attract potential customers.
- Strategic Approach Key: You can maximise your impact through a blog content plan and testing Calls to Action (CTAs).
- Real World Example: My case study proves that a single blog post can turn readers into paying customers.
The History of Blogging
It’s part of the vernacular now, but blog, blogger, and blogging were once quite alien words in the English language and often questioned by “the man on the street”. Maybe they still are to some people.
The word blog is a portmanteau, a contraction of two words, web and log. So a blog is a weblog, or blog for short.
Someone who writes blogs is a blogger, and their art is blogging.
I personally first got into blogging through the official platform Blogger.com in about 2003/2004 from what I can remember. The Blogger service was founded in 1999 and acquired by Google in 2003. Basically it was a free web service where you signed up, created an identity and a blog name, then set about writing and curating an audience and participating in an active community.
I personally blogged under a couple of aliases back in the day, met a nice lady blogger from the USA in 2005, got married to her in 2010, and we had a child together in 2012. So Blogger has played a significant part in my life.
Nowadays, whilst Blogger.com is still around but I don’t think it’s as big as it used to be (I could be wrong), blogs are everywhere. This here is a blog on a WordPress CMS with my own personal name as the domain name. Facebook has taken over as a free place to post, and Twitter became, originally, the home of the 140 character post, or micro-blogging as it was called.
How things have changed.
Persuading the C-Suite of the Business Benefits of Blogging
Back in 2004 I was also involved in a large website migration. I’d been working on the is4profit.com business advice website for a few years (since 2000) and had experienced the dot com boom (and bust). Then the marketplace recalibrated and we adjusted our business and marketing strategy.
Our website was built in pure HTML and had become really awkward to update. So I suggested migrating to a CMS – Joomla! was its name. I handled the complete migration of many thousands of pages of content, including setting up the server, designing the website, building and developing it, populating it with old and new content, adding new features, then finally launching and marketing the website. It was an amazing and yet highly successful digital project.
By 2007 Joomla! 1.0 had to be migrated to 1.5 and so, not wanting all the stresses of a long migration, I managed the project but handed over the design and build to core members of the Joomla! project.
It was around the same time that I persuaded the board at is4profit to allow me to add a news channel to the website. After initially using a third party’s thin content and proving that quality content was preferred by Google, I turned the native Joomla! pages into business news stories and made a massive success out of this channel.
Demonstrating the increase in traffic, the improved relevance, and the overall success of having a news channel to keep the website fresh and drive visits, I used the good news to persuade the board once more to invest in the website having a business blog channel.
While the small business news channel was a runaway success, beating many official outlets to rankings in the news search, it was still very formal. What the is4profit website needed was a less formal channel, somewhere to talk about the less serious aspects of the sector.
And so, splicing a WordPress blog into a Joomla! website, I ran the small business blog from 2008 until the sale of the business in 2014. The small business blog was also a great success. It allowed us to informally post about Dragons Den and The Apprentice, whilst simultaneously still being able to broadcast serious news about inflation, global crashes, plummeting interest rates, and events that affected the UK SME sector.
By seeing impressions go up, relevant keywords and their long-tail variants start to rank is music to a CEOs ears. If writing blogs can also bring in more leads and sales then blogging is essential and you need to keep informing and delighting your customers.
The SME Blog Ran Away With the News
The small business news section of is4profit.com was a great success. It was refreshed with new stories every weekday and it ranked well in the Google News channel with its own news format XML sitemap. That fresh new content every day kept the crawlers coming back, and the website was indexed regularly and deeply. There were additional benefits to simply having GoogleBot come crawl the latest news articles.
The news section also competed with bigger outlets, and where we had our finger on the pulse of the SME sector, larger national publications were still playing catch-up.
This competitive spirit flowed into the small business blog section, and we revelled in our commitment to blogging for SMEs.
Watching business themed shows on TV ended up in the blog, and we had wins with getting recognition from those we named from Dragons Den appearances (like Texas Joe and his authentic beef jerky) and independent productions like The Bank of Dave on Channel 4. The TV production company thought they had the rankings “in the bag” but when is4profit started commenting on the shows through its own blog posts, we saw #1 rankings and lots of traffic as inquisitive surfers went looking for the show online.
So we had it all – a business news section and now a business blog. All making great strides by providing the great British business public with what it wanted.
Fast Forward: 2025
And now it’s twenty odd years later. I’ve been writing blog posts for over two decades now.
There’s this here digital marketing blog, active since 2007, and I wrote another digital marketing blog for a local marketing agency for 8 years from 2017-2024. It was in the top ten alongside the likes of big name professionals like Neil Patel.
Plus I have written blogs for recruitment companies, electronic equipment suppliers, IT firms, cybersecurity companies, and telecoms providers. Every time I’ve written blogs for businesses, we’ve seen wins.
Even when I’ve not written blogs but only optimised the clients’ content using my SEO skills, I’ve seen great things.
I helped gain visibility for an excellent blog written by a female solicitor, helping her get views and comments during the #MeToo movement. An equipment firm starting seeing rank and clicks for energy services related to their products – their ecommerce pages didn’t discuss all the applications, so my blogs did, adding new dimensions to their website in so many ways.
I could go on.
The Benefits of Blogging
Blogging works. Having a content strategy that involves regular blog writing is worth its weight in gold. You will see impressions, rank, and clicks increase. Topical authority will improve. If you’re adding comprehensive, quality content to your blog section that helps users and enriches understanding, then you’re adding value.
Your brand value will increase too. Being known as an authority, the experts on a certain subject, will boost your credibility. You can become the “go to” source for your sector. Imagine being the number one local law firm or the top IT company – whatever your organisation does, we can improve your credibility and show off your hidden talents through strategic blog writing.
And these improvements of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust are all part of how Google’s team of human search quality raters look at and assess your website against their E-E-A-T criteria. By aligning with E-E-A-T you are providing helpful, quality content.
So whilst you’ll see these benefits, will they add to your bottom line? It depends…
Organic traffic takes time to develop, I added a topic to a digital marketing agency’s website last year that has taken 10 months to gain traction. I built a core of content and wrote blogs around the key subject. Now (Jan 2025) they are ranking in the top 10 of Google for terms around B2B marketing agency. They were nowhere before that. No longer providing them consultancy, I don’t know if they’ll capitalise on the visibility but it’s in their hands now.
Direct Leads from Blogs
The historical nature of blogs is that they’re “soft power”. They support key aspects of your website by reiterating your experience and expertise, adding to your authoritativeness and solidifying trust in your services, your products, and your brand.
That you can get direct leads from your blog is certainly possible.
It’s entirely up to your business whether it wishes to project this soft power or be more direct. That’s a business and marketing strategy that you can test tactically. By adding Calls To Action (CTAs) in your business blog writing needs to be user tested.
Run A/B tests to deliver versions of your bog post to browsers. Display the natural, unadulterated version, with no CTAs, plus the more direct post, with clear CTAs.
Measure behaviour. What is the dwell time on the blog posts? How engaged are your readers? Did you get clicks?
Case Study: Generating Business from Blog Writing
A few years ago I wrote a blog post for a digital marketing agency in which I documented a technical SEO task I was working on. I didn’t normally blog about specific work the agency conducted since they didn’t always have enough resource for such things – no time and therefore no money. However, off my own back, as an SEO consultant and their digital marketing manager, I wrote up the technical SEO study in my own time.
In the post, entitled Optimising Mega Menus for SEO, I methodically went through a case where I was concerned about the “code bloat” of a mega menu for a law firm’s website, and whether all the links they were demanding be listed in the mega menu were necessary.
I went through an example of a menu system that I liked (The BBC) and then started to analyse the data behind the firm of solicitors’ mega menu.
Ultimately, I reduced the links to the most popular and/or profitable/convertible services, thus helping to:
- Reduce the number of options in the UX, making is simpler and easier for users,
- Trim the amount of HTML source code, making the Document Object Model (DOM) slightly smaller and helping web browsers render and reflow the page,
- Reduce overhead in the number of links and amount of code that crawlers first encounter and consider,
- Make it easier for bots to crawl and index,
- Improve and prune the internal link structure.
The results of researching, writing, and publishing this technical SEO blog post were numerous:
- The post gained top 10 rankings for terms around optimising menus
- Clicks followed the increase in impressions and rankings
- The digital marketing agency received at least one lead that converted into a customer
Now one definite lead may not sound much, but one lead is better than no leads, right? Also, I dealt with the inquiry directly and asked why they were seeking the agency’s SEO services to help optimise their menu in particular – they confirmed that it was the blog post that they found and read that secured their enquiry. Of course, they turned into a paying customer too.
And that is the power of a blog post. The time and cost it took to research and write that article (half a day to a day) was far smaller than the revenue generated from converting a visitor and reader into a client.
Recap: The Power of Consistent Blogging
Let’s have a quick recap of the main points above:
- Blogging’s Enduring Value: From its early days right up to the present day, blogging has consistently proven its worth in driving traffic and improving online visibility.
- Building Authority: Regularly updated, high-quality content establishes your brand as a trusted authority in your industry.
- Strategic Implementation: Effective blogging involves a well-thought-out content strategy and user-tested calls to action to maximise engagement and conversions.
- Direct Lead Generation: While often considered a “soft power”, blogging can directly lead to valuable business opportunities, as demonstrated by the mega menu optimisation case study.
- SEO Benefits: Blogging provides many SEO benefits including improved indexation, more relevant keywords and long-tail variants start to rank.
There’s a lot of power in blogging for business, so consider it and do it, with a seasoned blog writer onboard too.
Conclusion: Embrace Blogging for Business Growth
So to sum it all up, the evidence from over two decades of experience in writing and publishing blogs for business is very clear: blogging works.
And it’s not just about the writing; it’s about strategically crafting content that informs, engages, and ultimately converts. Whether you aim to subtly build brand authority or directly drive leads, a consistent and well-executed blogging strategy is an invaluable asset for any business seeking sustainable growth in today’s highly competitive digital marketplace.
Don’t underestimate the power of your words – start blogging today and unlock your business’s full potential.
And if you need that seasoned blogger to research and write your business blogs for you, call me on 01252 692 765 or fill in the contact form with your project details.