If you're not in on the whole business blogging scene, you're probably tired of people telling you why you should be.
The blog-pushers who insist it's a great way to create a community around your product.
The evangelists who argue blogging is a great way to create conversation.
The practical folks who tell you blogging is a better way to publish your press releases.
You don't dispute any of this. You just find it wishy-washy.
Your business is a data-driven machine. You live and die by leads and sales. You don't have time for unmeasurable, time-consuming concepts like community and conversation.
Fine.
Forget community. Forget conversation. There's a far simpler, far more measurable reason to blog: search engine rankings .
If you publish a regularly updated, well-written blog on your company's site, it will show up more often in search engine results.
Most marketers miss this. They focus on the sexier social, networking and thought-leadership aspects of blogging. These are all very important reasons to blog (you can't reallyforget community and conversation), but they're complicated to measure.
Great search engine ranking is easier to measure. Just consider how much you'd have to pay to get equivalent ranking on a pay-per-click basis.
If you write a post about your fantastic windmill consulting firm and it shows up in the search results for "new windmills", your blog will get lots of new traffic and leads that you'd otherwise have to pay to for.
This blog is another great example. It drives three times as much traffic from Google to HubSpot as HubSpot's traditional company site. To purchase the same kind of traffic (and the leads that come with it) we'd have to pay Google millions.
Think about that -- our blog is giving us millions of dollars worth of free advertising andgenerating leads we can count.
There's nothing wishy-washy about that.
