As Alec Baldwin’s character from Glengarry Glenross said, “A-B-C. Always Be Closing.”

Blogging has many benefits and the ones most commonly discussed are:

• Great for search engine optimization
• Helps to grow community
• Provides a reason for people to visit your website more frequently
• Promotes lead generation

All of these are fantastic reasons to blog. But all of them take significant time to reap the benefits.

A blog will not dramatically improve your SEO overnight. It takes time to grow an online community. These things do help lead generation, but again, it’s a long term investment.

But there are at least three major short term benefits to blogging – credibility, self-selection and cross-selling.This blog is a perfect example. The blog is only about 2 months old, but our traffic is growing steadily, and our organic search results have improved significantly. Our Alexa ranking has improved. And we’re getting a decent number of blog comments (hint, hint… please participate in our comments!)

That said, we’re not exactly pulling in thousands of visitors each week (yet.) As of today I cannot point to any leads that were specifically generated due to a blog post. Each individual post is a brick in the wall – a small asset that provides an ongoing return.

Credibility

Already, however, we’ve seen the impact of this blog on our sales funnel – just not at the start of the funnel. Rather, we’ve noticed that our existing leads are using the blog to check our credibility. Beyond our presentation to them, do we truly seem like we know what we’re talking about? Do we know what we’re doing? Are we smart and savvy?

This blog acts as a great credibility check and goes a very long way to helping us close business. Several recent new leads have commented that our blog is helping them to make a decision and has made them more inclined to want to work with us.

A good blog can position you and your company as thought leaders. It provides potential customers with a soft-sell way to learn more about you and what you can do for them.

Self-selection

You only have so many hours in the day. You get lots of leads, but how many of them are good leads? How many times have you wasted time going down the rabbit hole with a lead that could never have really become a good customer for you?

A blog helps leads to qualify themselves on your behalf. A lead who reads your blog and decides whether she agrees with your opinions and personality (or not) is more likely to know if she’s likely to have a mutually-beneficial client relationship with you — and, if not, she won’t want to waste her time and yours.

Cross-selling

Have you ever had clients that hired you for a specific purpose and didn’t even realize there were other valuable services or products you could offer them? We’ve already seen a couple cases in which a lead contacted us for a specific service, read our blog, and then approached us for additional services they weren’t initially aware we provided.

Takeaway

There are a lot of great reasons your business should be blogging consistently, and we’ll continue to explore those reasons here in future posts. Most approaches will take a while to achieve a solid, demonstrable return. But there are definitely several great reasons to get started that should provide you with an immediate payback.

Need strategic, technical or creative guidance in starting or revisiting your business blog? Send us an email. We can help.