Welcome to part 3 of our ‘Why Should I Have A Small Business Blog’ series – if you’ve not already, feel free to take a look at part one, about content creation, and part two, about social sharing and re-using material. In this article, we’re going to be looking at a couple of the benefits you can provide to your readers through a blog in terms of engagement, additional features and interaction. {Tweet}

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Why Should I Have A Small Business Blog Part 3 – Engaging Your Visitors

Engaging your visitors and keeping them returning to your website is a key element within the sales funnel – whether you’re offering a service, selling a product, trying to promote a cause or encourage people to donate for instance. Although the research on touch points generally suggests that ‘it depends’ what you’re offering as to the number of touch points a potential lead might require, they tend to suggest that it is generally more than one (around 5-8, and more for B2B marketing). As such, if you can encourage people to return to your website time and time again, you’re already on the right track – building confidence and familiarity. {Tweet}

We’ve covered some of the obvious benefits in terms of this in the first couple of posts on this topic, but here we’re going to focus on two very specific aspects: comments and e-books.

Small Business Blog Comments

Blog comments are a great opportunity for you to engage with your potential audience directly. These are people who have taken the time to read your content, and have been influenced by it enough to spend some of their time letting you know their thoughts. This opens up the opportunity for a conversation, as well as potentially giving you the opportunity to highlight any other relevant pages which they might be interested in. {Tweet}[responsive]

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For instance, if someone has commented on a blog article written by a men’s footwear retailer about Italian leather shoes and the design inspiration behind them, mentioning that they really like a particular style of shoe, this is the perfect opportunity to reply to them and provide them with a link to a product page which (you’ve guessed it) shows a pair of leather shoes which might interest them.

On a side note, comments on blog posts also create additional content for that web-page which can be indexed by Google and the other search engines – just be sure not to accept spam comments and to set any links within the comments box to be ‘rel=nofollow’. {Tweet}

Using Blog Posts To Create An E-book

Another use of blog posts, and one which can be used to engage your customers, is to create an e-book made up from a collection of your blog posts. There are a whole range of services out there on the internet, some paid and some free, which can help you do this – or, if you have any design skills, you can do it yourself. {Tweet}

One of the best and most common uses of this type of tactic is to have the e-book as a piece of downloadable content which users can access in return for providing an email address. This helps grow your email list and you also know that these individuals have some interest in whatever the e-book is about – Italian shoe designs for instance!

This is also a really good way to recycle some blog content – meaning you can provide customers and website visitors with a ‘tangible’ item without having to invest more of your own time and resources.

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