REASONS TO BLOG *** DO YOU BLOG?

I've learned that blogging is a marketing tool used during the social media and video marketing strategies.  It is an ideal anchor for multi-marketing that can drive attention to your website and assist in growing your brand.  It allows you to brand yourself while becoming recognizable to customers and growing loyalty.  Having your own unique personality is a way of knowledge-dropping to your audience. Just having a website is not enough, but blogging helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that.  The idea is to publish consistent, informative content that provides value to your website visitors.  

Blogs are trustworthy and informative.  Your followers will click on a quick video out of boredom or curiosity. But when they want to dig deeper and learn more, they’ll turn to your latest blog posts or be lead to your website.  It’s an opportunity for you to show up in search engines, which drives traffic to your website in organic searches.  You want your blog to be a reflection of your company’s values.

Blog content also helps you get discovered via social media.  This is how traffic-to-lead conversions work, it's as simple as this:

• Visitor comes to website
• Visitor sees call-to-action for a free offer
• Visitor clicks call-to-action and gets to a landing page, which contains a form for them to fill in with their information or a comment box.

Not every reader of your blog will become a lead. That's okay.  No one converts 100% of the people who read their blog into leads.  

Blogging can be incredibly valuable to a variety of people and for a variety of reasons.  You can be benefited personally, professionally, and financially from blogging.  Were as I don’t consider myself a great blogger, I am a great wedding planner and event designer and blogging has brought more attention to my business.  I recommend blogging to almost everyone I meet. Here are the few reasons I recommend blogging. 

• Attract an Audience… Blogging works as a method for attracting an audience because it provides something of value to them before asking for anything in return.  It enables you to reach billions of internet users and helps promote your business.  By creating a blog that is of value, you can attract an audience and eventually convert them to customers, partners, friends, or otherwise.
• Establish Authority… Having a blog and writing about important topics that are relevant to your audience establishes yourself as an authority in the space. It enhances your professional image.  Also, it has become the new business cards.
• Build Rapport and Engagement… Blogging can convert traffic into leads and leads into customers.
• Create Opportunities… Blogging can lead to other business and traffic generating opportunities; such as speaking engagements or press releases. 
• Organize and Articulate Your Thoughts and Learn…  Blogging forces you to teach yourself what you don’t know and to articulate what you do know. When you begin writing a blog post, you are forced to organize your thoughts. If there are any gaps in the topic that you are writing about, you will have to learn about it. Writing out and articulating your thoughts is a great way to internalize something you’ve learned or experienced. Writing helps you become more familiar with the topic you’re writing about.
• Tell Your Story…  Blogging enables you to be your own media company. You can tell your story the way you want to tell it without being dependent on journalists. When you are writing about a topic of your own interest, you can decide how to portray a story, what information to include, and what information to exclude. Blogging allows you to ensure that all information included in the blog is factual.