Building an effective website is a lot more difficult than it used to be. Once upon a time, marketers could get by with a basic web page consisting of little more than a few grammatically challenged sentences about why their company was number one, and an out-of-focus photo of the business’ storefront. Crude as they were, these websites actually drew visitors and generated sales.

Those days are long gone. Today’s web user is much more interested in the unique and useful information that your website provides than in reading a bullet-point list of the benefits of doing business with your company. Great content truly is King – with the consumer that searches for it, and with the search engines that rank websites based on it.

A Blog is the Best Way to Get More Eyeballs on Your Content
Blogging is hands down one of the cheapest and most effective means of generating exposure for your company, creating online engagement with your audience, and building trust and authority for your brand. According to HubSpot:

• Companies that have a blog generate 55 percent more website visitors, receive 97 percent more backlinks, and have 434 percent more web pages indexed by the search engines than those companies without a blog.
• Companies that publish a minimum of 20 blog posts each month attract more than five times the volume of traffic than those companies that publish less than four posts per month.
• Companies blogging at least 20 times each month generate four times the number of leads than those companies without a blog.

A Company Blog is a Traffic Magnet
A steady flow of traffic is essential to the success of any website, and regular blog posting is an excellent way to drive qualified visitors to your web pages. By routinely adding fresh and informative content to your blog, your audience will be encouraged to return to your site on a regular basis.

What’s more, Google tends to index blog posts quicker than most other type of web content. The more pages you have indexed, the more potential for increased traffic. Adding relevant keywords to your posts will help ensure that you’re generating highly focused traffic that can be directed to your company website.

A Company Blog Establishes You as the Go-to Expert for Your Niche
Blogs that provide relevant and useful information that helps your audience get questions answered and issues resolved is a powerful and effective method of establishing your company as the authority expert for your particular industry or niche. In addition to helping differentiate yourself from your competitors, you’ll build the trust and authority that is critically important in converting website visitors into loyal customers.

A Company Blog Gets Your Audience Engaged
When you enable comments in your blog, you create a golden opportunity for potential customers to directly engage with your brand. The more engagement you can stimulate, the greater chance you have of building a loyal following. With this engagement, you’ll also receive valuable insight into the important issues of concern to your audience that can be addressed in future blog posts.

A Company Blog Generates Highly Qualified Sales Leads
Many companies leverage their blog for targeted lead generation. A research study has found that 61 percent of consumers have made a purchase as a result of reading a blog post. Clearly, an engaged audience of loyal readers who follow your blog on a regular basis are more likely to convert to paying customers than practically any other class of prospects.