When you create a successful company blog the benefits are endless. A company blog will drive more traffic to your website, build trust, improve SEO efforts and generate more leads.

Here’s a look at 3 effective ways a company blog can help grow your business.

1. Become an industry expert or an influencer

As I mentioned earlier, blogging helps businesses build trust with their audience. For one, you show your expertise and knowledge. Second, a company blog can help humanize your brand.

If you want to establish yourself as an authority and gain social influence it can take some time. However, the results are worth it. Whether you’re an entrepreneur who wants to build a personal brand or you want to build your company brand, blogging is an authority builder.

Make sure your content is opening act material. Keep on track of industry news and developments with Google Alerts. You don’t need to share an opinion piece on every piece of news, but you should show your readers that you are relevant and forward thinking. This means sharing best practices, new apps and tools that will benefit your audience. For example:

• Share a weekly curated list all of the latest industry news to provide value to your audience.

• Create educational content (e.g., how to guides, templates, checklists, etc.).

The more value you can offer your audience, the better.  Guest blogging and contributed articles, like this one, can boost your authority.

2. 
Collaborate with social media influencers to grow brand visibility

Influencer marketing is the biggest buzzword in marketing right now and it offers you a lot of possibilities to increase brand visibility. When you connect with social media influencers you extend your reach to a larger, but targeted, audience. As a result, you boost your own social influence as well.

To start, find relevant social influencers. Review the type of content they post on their platforms and ensure it aligns with your brand. Do they talk to the same niche? You can use tools like Buzzsumo to find a list of content an influencer has shared in the past.

Once you create a short-list of influencers, look at their follower engagement – not follower numbers. Anyone can buy followers these days, so the number of followers can be deceiving. A large following doesn’t necessarily mean they are influential. On the other hand, if someone has 50k followers and a very engaged audience, that makes them much more valuable. Use tools like Agorapulse to check engagement on Facebook Page and Twitter.

3. Build your email list with free digital downloads

Supplement each content piece with a freebie download. For example, if you’ve shared a long-from “How to” guide, it will probably generate more traffic than a shorter blog post. This is a great opportunity to offer email sign up in exchange for exclusive content.

You can create, for example, a PDF version of your guide with added bonus information to serve as incentive for opt-ins. This can lead to a big boost in email sign ups, simply because the content is targeted to the visitor who is already interested in that topic.

Alternatively, if you only offer one general incentive on your website, it won’t be nearly as targeted. This means your leads will likely be low quality (e.g., freebie seekers). That’s not to say you should discard the general opt-in; rather, create more opt-ins regularly, so you can gather more leads.

Final thoughts

A company blog coupled with the right content marketing strategy will help your business stand out and scale quickly. Build trust, bring in more traffic and gather more leads – oh, and don’t forget about your websites’ domain authority when it comes to search engine rankings.

So, what are you waiting for? Create a blogging strategy, create content and watch the results in real-time.

This article has been edited.

Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach Bullock has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street. She’s a hugely connected and highly influential entrepreneur. Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers and was crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle. She is listed as the number one Influencer in the UK by Career Experts and is a recipient for a Global Women Champions Award for her outstanding contribution and leadership in business. Connect with @lilachbullock on Twitter.

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