We know how easy and fun it is to engage with your readers, customers, or friends on various social media channels. But what’s happening on your blog?
It’s all too often that we see business people making frequent updates on their social media accounts while posts on their blog have sat lingering for two or three years. In this article, we’re going to give you a handful of reasons why your blog needs more attention. (You don’t want to miss these. Your business may depend on it.)
Isn’t Social Media Good For Business?
Social media can certainly have a positive outcome for your business, but there are reasons to be skeptical. And when it comes to your business, healthy skepticism may save you.
Social Media Users Are Distracted And May Miss You Entirely
Among the common arguments in defense of sustained social media use are the business side effects such as increased visibility.
True, there are a lot of people on social media, and by following your Instagram or Facebook page you have an opportunity to make thousands of impressions a day. But social updates are highly replicable: this means you’re not the only game in town, and all of your competitors are using social as well. This also means the average social media user’s attention is fragmented, making it much more difficult for you to break in through the noise.
Social Is Merely One Possible Source of Traffic Among Many
What about traffic? It’s also true that you can get a lot of referral traffic to your business through social media. But, again, your competition for those links is fierce. And, when it comes to traffic, diversity is just as important (if not, more important) than sheer volume.
What if all of your traffic comes from social media? Good? Not so good if the social media service that refers you disappears, as Google+ did. Then all of your traffic is gone. Likewise, social signals from various platforms have a decay time beyond which they are no longer considered viable. So all of those hard-earned social links you got won’t be worth much in the long run.
Instead of relying so heavily on social traffic, try to diversity with defensible traffic from other reliable sources:
- Direct (people finding you because they know your domain name)
- Organic search results (Google? Bing? Yahoo?)
- Referrals (links from other sites which may or may not include social media)
- Paid search
- Email marketing
We find that by diversifying your sources of traffic, you can more easily protect yourself from a vanishing social media service or even a Google algorithm change.
At the end of the day, no matter where your traffic comes from, if your blog is out of date, your readers will likely bounce.
Your Website Is Still The Central Hub
Taking all of the above into consideration, you can perhaps see how optimizing your website is still critically important for your business. Once you’ve received that coveted referral link from a reputable source, your website may skyrocket in popularity. And when it comes to organic search results, optimizing your own website allows you much control than optimizing a social page.
Your Blog as a Signal of Life
When a potential visitor lands on your page and finds a blog index, you have an opportunity to show them your activity in a significant way. You can have blog posts about all or at least some of these activities:
- New developments in your field
- Conferences you visited
- Authoritative opinions
- High-resolution images
- Useful, surprising, or delightful tidbits about your product
- Case studies
The list goes on. Compared to the arbitrary limitations of a social platform, your blog can offer you unparalleled freedom of expression.
Your Blog as a Source of Traffic
Blog posts, properly optimized, can be a gateway into your business from the outside world. If you have a variety of blog posts on many topics, you can incorporate a “long-tail” keyword strategy. This means you might rank well in search engines for obscure topics. Once on your site, new visitors are likely found value there because you represented a topic that was of interest to them.
Hot tip: Make sure your blog posts link back to your most important pages.
Bring It All Together
No matter what your marketing strategy is, a blog can help you tie it all together. It can be your testament to the world of how great your business is. It can be a way of expressing why you’re an authority in your area. It can even be a way to help people find you and see why they should listen up.
You have a lot of options out there when it comes to hosting a blog. For our customers, we recommend WordPress because it’s powerful and easy to use. And our WordPress Hosting plan is optimized to give you the speed and security you need.
