Your Business Should Have a Website and
That Website Should Help You Make Money
I say that up front because I want you to know where I’m coming from. We are a technology company that does complex technological and geeky things for amazing companies. We also have great salespeople and we do various kinds of marketing, sponsorships, and advertising. All of these efforts generate leads. According to the numbers, though, our best lead machine is our blog. If you’ve been wondering, “Should my business have a website?” or “What good is a blog on my website?” read a little further. Here are 5 ways that our blog has helped our business.
1. Our Blog Helps People Get to Know Us
Over 15,000 people come to our website over the course of a month. That’s a lot of traffic for a technology company in a small city in southern Indiana! The majority of our website visitors aren’t from anywhere near Evansville, but they are coming to learn about things that are helpful to them wherever they are. If 1% of those visitors looked around the site and learned about what we offer, that’s 150 people we are reaching beyond that first page. If 10% of those interested people convert into leads, we’re bringing in 15 interested leads per month!
Our blog works on a local level, too. When our sales team goes to a chamber networking event about email spam filters and someone says “I didn’t know you guys did that!” they can send that interested friend to our blog post about it. People who think they know about us can learn a lot more when they read up on our blog. Many small business owners choose to work with a limited number of vendors, and most are happy to find one vendor that can provide multiple services. Our blog helps to showcase the wide variety of services we offer.
2. Blog Posts Help Happy Customers Share Us with Others
As part of our secure web hosting, we renew the SSL certificate for our customers automatically. When the work is complete, I email every customer and tell them the work is done and when the new certificate will expire. Then, I put this in the email message:
If you would like to know more about your secure hosting or if you have a friend that wants to know more about secure hosting, you can visit or share this blog post. https://ltnow.com/trust-website-with-https/
This is going to do three things to help out my customer.
- Help avoid buyer’s remorse by educating them about the awesome thing they bought from us
- Inform them so they can make their boss happy about buying secure web hosting from us
- Give them a way to share this technical content with a friend
By passing on a blog post, I just helped my customer stay loyal, feel justified and smart, and be the helpful peer to their friends on LinkedIn. I get to be the hero by making my client feel like the hero, and it’s all leading to valuable website traffic.
3. Technical Blog Posts Bring in High-Paying Customers
Every once in a while, we publish a blog post that is highly technical. Articles about relative or canonical tags or how email spam filters work might appear to be over the heads of 90% of our readership, but they bring in business. When someone is searching Google for more technical answers and they find them on your site, they are more likely to respect you because you provide a good, informed answer. They respect you as a peer they can reach out to for help because you have answered their complex question.
There are plenty of high content sites out there with general answers to questions. However, general answers don’t provide value to someone searching a more in-depth question. If you can answer a complex question for searchers, you’re gaining a lead from someone in a pretty complex situation. Complex situations are often born out of complex projects, and who doesn’t love helping someone complete a complex project?
4. We Write Blog Posts to Save Time
Every other week we ask our sales team, “What questions are you being asked during your sales calls?” We then write blog posts that answer these common questions. Instead of taking the time to explain business continuity options, we can email a blog post and then follow up in a few days. If we have a meeting with an entire team and one person is about to derail the meeting with questions about next year’s budget, we can provide a blog post that they can check out later.
We also use blog posts when we onboard new customers. New web design customers get emails about WordPress. New telecom or office phone customers get some links about how to use their office phones. We put all of our web design clients on Google Analytics, and the setup would take us about 30 minutes with each customer. Instead, we send them a blog post that we wrote to walk them through the process and they can do it on their own time. We aren’t on the clock or on the phone, so it saves everyone time and money.
5. Our Blog is Like a Trophy Case for Our Business
When you have a blog on your website, you have a place to tell the world about projects you’ve completed, awards you have won, and the clients you are the proudest of. While most job-seekers do this on LinkedIn all of the time, you can write a blog post about a project you completed and then share it multiple times in different ways on social media. Share it as a link on LinkedIn, and then a few weeks later re-publish it as a LinkedIn Post. Making that a weekly or at least monthly practice will help keep your website fresh in the eyes of search engines and give you regular content to feed to LinkedIn and your Facebook Busines page.
When we write up a case study about something we have done, we gather input from our client to feature in the article. That not only helps us learn what our clients really appreciate about our work, but it opens up a conversation to help us become better web designers. If we thought the drop-down menu was the coolest thing about a site but the client says their favorite part was the complex feedback form, we learn and become better at serving future customers.
Get the Blog Going on Your Website
Rick Culiver, our Director of Business Development, often says,
“If your website isn’t bringing you at least one lead a month, you are wasting your hosting cost. You are wasting money.”
These five ways that a blog helped us bring in more business are not technology-specific. They would scale across a lot of small business and even medium-sized companies. When considering the strategy of how your website fits into the growth of your company, make sure you have a blog in the plan. You might have 15,000 visitors a month thanking you.