If you have been on many businesses websites lately, you may have noticed their 'blog' button, leading you through to their online blog. You may be questioning why an airline need a blog for example, the answer is that it has been shown that blogging can hugely increase a companies business, according to a HubSpot survey, 60% of business who blog acquire more customers- we like that figure!

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Two main reasons to blog have remained the same for years- your blog fuels SEO- search engines reward you for content, and, it is a mostly informal place where customers and brands can interact and communicate directly to their customers and clientele. Whilst you may Tweet, Instagram and post on Facebook, your blog is somewhere you can add as many images and as much text as you want to and not be limited to 140 characters. If a customer reads your blog, and can see you are knowledgeable in your area, whatever that may be, that will encourage trust and confidence in your company that may not be created on social media as your voice, your personality, your interests or your expertise may not shine through as well as on a blog where you are free to express yourself. It can also take people from your social media straight onto an off-link to your website and hopefully convert them into customers by being on your webpage instead of simply a social media follower.

Whilst blogging can be a fun past time to partake in, it can also be a huge channel to use to share your brands background and story, a way to introduce your team of workers for example and show your customers more about your business that you may not want to do on the professional front of your website. The blog is more informal, laid back and allows you to give additional information about your buiness interwined with content to increase awareness of your brand. As worded by Forbes online, "In terms of search engine rankings, I like to think of blogging as fishing. The more hooks you have in the water, the more likely you are to catch a fish. In the same way, as you add more content to your site, more pages from your domain become indexed in search engines. This improves organic search visibility and increases website traffic."

Towards the early days of blogging, short concise blogs were the norm at 300-600 words a piece, however with increased content being published online daily, this has increased so posts are usually around 1200-2000 words, this is in order to reach good SEO – short content in general doesn't have as much value and is therefore not ranked as highly. According to Business2Community, content has the biggest impact on your SEO than anything else on your website- including the coding. They also state how using links to authoritive sites also increases your ranking, as you would offline in citating websites or books, doing this online means search engines see you are doing research to provide content which is well informed and well rounded. The marketing you create with your brand is more important and critical for your SEO than anything else you can do, and increased SEO in theory should directly impact your sales- or at least website impressions.

Blogging, therefore, is something every business should look into. According to HubSpot those businesses with 401-1000 pages of content get 6 times the leads websites with 51-100 do. Simply put, the more you blog the more leads you generate, and therefore the more sales you get- so go get started!

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