Organic traffic:
The single most lucrative benefit of starting a blog is to get organic traffic from search engines like Google and Bing. When the majority of people think of blogs, they think of a website where someone shares their thoughts on a specific topic or they share excerpts about their life. Although this is a stereotypical view of blogging, many brands and businesses are using blogs to bring their website hundreds of thousands of visitors each month for free.
When you publish a blog on a certain topic, Google picks up on keywords mentioned in the blog and ranks you accordingly on search results. Businesses use this to target keywords that their customers are looking for and write helpful content based on the keyword. When you provide a valuable post on a particular topic, you can rank for that term in the first few pages of Google.
Depending on how much traffic that keyword is getting and how competitive the keyword is, you can start bringing hundreds or thousands of visitors for free each month to your site off of just one post. Ranking highly for one just one valuable keyword can literally add thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars to your bottom line.
Brand building:
A blog is a great method to build your personal or business brand. Since blog traffic is generated by targeting specific keywords, you can brand yourself as an expert in a particular topic by providing the best content for specific topics. If you consistently publish content around a particular topic, do proper on-page SEO and build links, you can start building a sustainable brand that can open many future opportunities for you.
For example, if you want to build a brand about being a blogging expert, you can write valuable content around all things blogging. As you produce more blogs, you will start gaining more domain authority in the space and get more organic traffic from Google. Once your blog has domain authority, your content will start to rank quicker and you will get even more traffic to your site. By building a brand with a blog, you can monetize your blog with a variety of methods like selling your own courses, consulting and more.
Email list:
Your blog can be a great way to capture leads and build an email list for your business. As you build your blog, your site will start to generate thousands of visitors each month on your posts. These visitors who are coming to your site are consuming the content you produce and they are great candidates to be future customers for your business. You can capture these visitors by creating an opt in for your email list.
An email list is basically the email and basic contact information of a lead. Once a lead joins your email list, you can start sending emails to them and provide some value. After a couple of emails, you can start pitching your services and make prospects on your email list into customers. An email list is one of the best assets for your business because you own the list and you can market to your list however you want. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, the average return is $42 according to numerous marketing studies.
Monetization:
There are numerous ways you can monetize the traffic coming to your blog. Focusing on just one monetization method for your blog can help you generate thousands of dollars per month in revenue. Start with just one way to monetize your blog and you can add additional channels later to diversify. As you grow your channels, it’s vital to have a channel manager to streamline your marketing efforts.
Depending on the type of traffic you have, you can use:
Ads: You can place ads on your site to generate revenue. This is a good way to monetize your traffic if it’s mostly informational and you don’t have any products to sell. Once you reach a certain number of visitors to your site, you can start applying for ad programs. These programs will pay you a certain amount of money per thousand visitors to your site (RPM). Depending on the niche you blog in, rates can be anywhere from $7-$40 per thousand visitors.
Affiliate marketing: You can also monetize your blog with affiliate marketing. When you write a blog post on a certain topic, there are some companies who will pay you a commission for any product you sell online for them. You can place affiliate links in your content and you will get a cut when one of your visitors chooses to use a service you promote. This can be a very lucrative and passive method to monetize your blog.
Sponsorships: Once your blog has established its brand, sponsors may start reaching out to you to get content on your blog. The more traffic your blog has, the more lucrative these sponsorships can be. Since you own the blog, you can choose how much sponsors will pay for a particular blog post.
Own products: You can pitch your own products and services in your blog posts. For most businesses, this is the most profitable way to monetize your blog. If you are selling high ticket items and services, selling these products and services will net you more money than doing ads or affiliate marketing.
Autonomy:
When building an audience for your brand or business, the vast majority of mediums available today provide you little to no autonomy. A person or business can spend years building an audience on a platform and their channel or medium can get taken away for a variety of reasons. In reality, you are renting the audience when you build on a platform like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. The autonomy provided by blogging allows you to shape your messaging as desired, an important aspect when addressing the needs of hybrid learning environments.
A blog is one of the main types of owned media that a business can own. Owned media is basically any type of media that you have complete control over. This is a lucrative asset and is commonly used when valuing a business when it’s acquired. With owned media like a blog, you have direct access to your customers without an intermediary.
The autonomy provided by having your own audience on your blog allows you to convey your messaging in whatever manner you desire. Additionally, businesses can use blogging to have their own internal blog for their employees. This is key to helping build the company culture and facilitating internal communication within an enterprise.
Lead generation
Blogging is one of the best mediums to attract and capture organic visitors from search engines. When you rank for certain keywords on search engines, you can start bringing in hundreds if not thousands of targeted visitors to your site. These are the ideal customers for the products and services you are offering.
Many businesses rely on other lead generation strategies like cold calling, social media or emails to find clients. Although these can work, it does not compare to getting thousands of visitors coming directly to your site. The visitors that come to your blog are the best leads because they are actively looking for a solution on what you blogged about.
This can be an opportunity to convert those visitors into paying customers for your business. Companies with blogs use several strategies to capture leads from their blogs. Some of the most prominent strategies to convert leads include creating email lists, adding call to action buttons and creating lead magnets. You can use multiple lead generation tactics at once. For example, you can set up a Twitter alert for keywords in addition to having organic traffic. This will help you generate leads from multiple platforms at once.
Networking
Building an authentic network of people and companies in the same niche as you can take multiple years. This can include going to conferences, doing presentations and similar networking events. With a blog, you have a public medium to express your thoughts at scale. There’s very few mediums that enable you to connect with a large audience by just creating individual content pieces. The only similar platform would be creating YouTube videos.
When you create a blog and start writing about a certain niche, you will start getting recurring visitors to your site. These are readers who have enjoyed reading something you wrote and have come back to read more content. You can leave your contact information on your blog and this is a great opportunity to network and share ideas or collaborate on a project.
An example of this is James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. He published blog posts two times per week for three years and this led to hundreds of thousands of visitors coming to read his blog. This gave him the opportunity to meet with and talk with some of the best minds in his niche. This also opened up many other opportunities like writing books and speaking engagements.
You can start doing the same for your blog. You don’t need hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site to start building your network. Just having a few hundred visitors per month can expose you to like minded people that can have a significant impact on your career and life.
