Blogging is an important and relevant part of social media marketing. While the height of blogging popularity peaked in the 90s and early 2000s as a form for activists to vent out, today businesses and corporations have discovered just how much running a professional blog could alter their profit margins.
More importantly however, blogs have become the number one channel for business that use content marketing to reach out to new leads and keep the existing leads engaged.
Companies use blogs to keep their customers informed about major and minor changes taking place in their industry as well as post informative content. Effective use of blog content creates customers loyalty and builds your brand value.
The Benefits of Having a Business Blog in Kenya
Business entrepreneurs who are effectively using blogs for content marketing report four main benefits. Note that the benefits far outweigh what these four points.
- Increased traffic to their money blogs and websites through social sharing and search engine visibility.
- Increases SEO, leading to increased visibility of their brands
- Makes brands appear stronger and authoritative
- and develop better customer relationships.
Keeping a regularly updated blog will give your small business the opportunity to create relevant connections with your leads. As people find your blog posts and share them, traffic to your money site builds up. Needless to say, some of this traffic is nurtured and qualified, leading to increased sales and profit for the your business business.
Blog posts that are well written and informative have a way of weaning and preparing the lead for the final sale. They do this by building the lead’s trust in the brand and eventually winning their loyalty. Again, by writing strictly non-promotional content on your blogs, you give your customers a chance to see and experiencing the human side of the company, allowing them to connect with the brand and remain loyal to it.
How to Make Your Kenyan Business Blog Successful
Achieving the non-promotional level of blogging explained above is not a mean feat. Successful blogging incorporates all of these things:
- Combines self-expression and subtle promotion
- Becomes a networking tool
- Supplies a platform for raising awareness about social issues
- Gives businesses a side source of income
- Advertising is made easier for businesses with a blog
- Requires creative thinking and writing
- Combines promotion, marketing, social networking, and social skills
- Needs web design, photography, and other media to be successful
- Takes time, money, and education to start it and maintain it
- Writers with discipline, creativity, courage, goals, time management, and organizational skills
Another often ignored benefit of running an active business blog is the fact that blogs are an accessory to the efforts you put into social media marketing. Your Kenyan blogs can feature every social media platform the business uses. By including social media sharing buttons with your blog posts, you actually manage to kill two birds with one stone.
Unlike social media sites, blogs allow businesses to give customers a full sense of who they are without the limitations that the social media sites present. Blogs do not limit businesses to a certain number of characters and do not require picture-only posts. The text focus gives businesses the chance to be human to their customers.
While blogging is not as popular as it used to be, it is still going to become a staple for the future of business. This is because it combines social skills, accessibility, textual content, user-friendly knowledge, and a standard for internet content.
Here is a nutshell of the advantages that blogging offers:
- Social. Blogging is posting quality content to the internet which often gets shared on social media sites. There is also the ability to comment and for the blogger to respond to comments. This makes it the ultimate social networking tool.
- Accessible. Blogging does not require any formal writing experience, just a great knowledge of the niche the blog belongs to.
- Text. Focus is beginning to shift away from media-only and back to a base of text content. Blogs are mostly text with the ability to insert images and videos. This allows blogs to incorporate all trends of marketing.
- User-friendly. There are many great blogging platforms that make content very easy to customize, post, and share.
- Standard. Blogging is a staple that has been around for two decades. It will continue to be a staple and soon will become standard for any job seekers and all college students to maintain.
Patrick Mahinge is a prolific digital marketer and "serial webpreneur". He runs multiple profitable niche websites and blogs monetized through affiliate marketing and advertising. Patrick generously shares his expertise in affiliate marketing, blogging, and online business through his Facebook group of over 5,000 aspiring entrepreneurs.
