One of the biggest advantages of business blogging is to provide value to visitors. Blogging is an inexpensive way for small businesses to attract traffic to their site, enhance inbound marketing efforts and attract more valuable customers.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the entire world to a standstill for several months. Businesses started operating on their business continuity plans, employees resorted to working from home, markets were closed, and more.
Small business owners had it worse during the pandemic as they struggled to keep their businesses running, let alone make a profit.
But, some businesses found new and innovative ways to utilize this time and make the most out of an already bad situation. Blogging is one such way that helped and is still helping businesses attract prospective customers and stay connected with existing ones.
So, start a blog, if you don’t already have one and benefit from it by building new and nurturing existing customer relationships.
Want to learn how to use blogging to your advantage?
Here are four ways in which you can benefit from blogging after the COVID-19 pandemic.
1. Provide Value to Customers
The first and most important benefit of blogging is to provide value to your audience (both existing and prospective customers). The entire purpose of a blog is to create and share useful and relevant content for your target audience.
This becomes especially important during times like these when the world is trying to survive a pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a lot of people worldwide to stay confined to their homes for long periods of time. During this time, they had more time and intent to consume online content as outside activities had come to a halt.
Brands that leveraged blogging during the pandemic will reap the benefits later as they will have gained tons of new and loyal readers for their blog. Even if you haven’t been actively blogging these past few months, it is still not too late to start.
Remember, the important thing is to post about topics that are relevant to your audience. Create content that is useful and provides actionable insights for your audience.
Also, don’t forget to ensure that your blog content is of high quality and has original insights. Hire a writer on a freelance basis, if you don’t have an in-house team, but make sure that you provide good quality content to your audience.
This is an excellent opportunity for you to build a loyal audience who may convert into customers later.
2. Stay Relevant and Connected
Another reason why all businesses should consider blogging during and after the pandemic is to stay connected with their customers.
This pandemic has caused a lot of businesses to stop their operations, even if it is only temporary.
So, what can such businesses do to stay connected with their customers?
Well, social media and blogs are two of the most effective ways to stay in touch with your customers and not let them forget about your brand. Even if your business is shut down, you can still connect with your customers by creating relevant content for them.
This will help you build strong customer relationships and foster brand loyalty, which will benefit you after the pandemic is over.
For example, the folks at Airbnb created detailed travel advisories and other useful content for their customers during the pandemic. It aimed at helping them travel safely. Even though most of their properties were not operational, this gesture still won them lots of loyal customers.
You can follow a similar strategy and create useful resources for your customers to help them during and after the pandemic. This will help you win loyal customers who will stay loyal even after the pandemic is over. After all, people stay loyal to businesses that care about them, and blogging during the pandemic is one of the ways in which you can show that you do.
3. Create Email Lists
Blogs are a great way to gather email information from your prospective customers and generate leads for your business. You can attract people to your website via good content and then use forms to capture their email information.
There are two main ways of capturing the email information of your blog readers. First, you can ask them to subscribe to your newsletter to stay updated on all the latest content on your blog. Second, you can create valuable gated content that they can access by providing their email information.
The former is fairly simple as many people who like your blog content will want to be informed about the latest posts via a newsletter. The latter, however, requires a little more effort as you need to create unique content that will encourage people to provide their details in exchange for downloading it.
Some of the best types of gated content include research studies, cheat sheets, ebooks, case studies, etc. Your gated content should be an exhaustive resource on a topic and better than the content that is currently available on the topic.
Overall, blogging can help you create valuable email lists that you can then use for both lead generation and nurturing. There are numerous email tools that can be used to create and maintain such email lists, and run drip email campaigns.
If you use blogging to create email lists during the pandemic, it will help you run email marketing campaigns after the pandemic.
4. Boost Website Traffic
Many businesses use blogging as a means to get more traffic on their websites and then apply conversion rate optimization techniques to convert them into customers.
During the pandemic, many people were confined to their homes, which gave them more time to consume content online. This is an excellent opportunity for businesses to benefit from blogging and boost their website traffic.
So, create good content on the trending topics in your niche and attract traffic to your website. Also, make sure that you optimize your content for relevant keywords, so that your blog content ranks high on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
You can also use a tool to optimize text and make your content more SEO friendly. Maintaining a good keyword density is essential if you want your blog posts to rank high on the SERPs.
Ready to Benefit from Blogging?
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people are now spending more time browsing content online than ever before. This presents an unmatched opportunity for you to build a loyal audience and generate leads that will benefit you after the pandemic.
Use blogging during and after the pandemic to build and nurture customer relationships that last a lifetime. Use the tips provided in this post to help you use blogging to your advantage.
Gaurav Sharma is the Co-founder of Attrock, a result driven Digital Marketing Agency. He’s a certified Google Analytics and Adwords specialist who regularly contributes to reputed publications like the Huffington Post, TechCrunch and many more. He leverages his experience and knowledge as a digital marketer to help influencers monetize their efforts and eCommerce and SaaS companies grow their revenues. When he isn’t inspiring his team of devoted individuals to achieve more, he can be found globe trotting, sampling all that the world has to offer.
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