Leads are often praised as the lifeblood of a business – and while not everyone will agree with that statement, leads are remarkably important to the success and growth of your business.

There are all kinds of lead generation activities, such as social media marketing and email marketing, but one of the top sources of leads is content marketing – especially, blogging.

In this blog post, there will be three reasons why blogging is one of the best lead generation tools for businesses.

Blogging helps drive targeted traffic to your website

This gives people a good enough reason to visit your business website. Unless you’re one of the world’s largest brands, there isn’t much reason why people would want to visit your website – or even find it.

Your business's online presence doesn’t offer much value to a potential visitor unless they are already familiar with your business and want to buy something or they somehow came across your website online and decided to give it a try. Plus, there are only so many opportunities that you can promote your website or landing pages on your different digital channels.

With a great blog, on the other hand, you have something to promote. You’re providing people a valid reason to visit your website – to view, read your content, to download a resource, or buy what your website offers.

Blogging doesn’t just help you drive added traffic, it also helps you keep visitors around for longer and provides them a reason to come back to your website and, hopefully, convert along the way as they get to discover more about you and your business.

Blogging also helps advance your search engine optimization; people make millions of Google or Bing searches every day searching for content so if you want to feature in these search results and get more organic traffic, then you want to create targeted, optimized content.

For example, if you google a targeted keyword like“healthy lifestyle diet”, most of the results on the first page are from health blogs that give helpful tips about what you are searching for:

If the content is excellent, they’re inclined to give away their information (for example, to sign up to your newsletter) and, along the way, even purchase from you.

Blogging gives your visitors a reason to convert

Following up from reason number one, blogging is a great lead generation tool that millions of businesses use for their digital marketing strategy because it provides value to the reader – and value makes them want to convert. However, you also need to include some well-placed calls to action throughout your blog to get visitors to convert:

• Tell them that they can sign up for your email newsletter to get more content straight to their inbox.

• Add calls to action to relevant blog posts highlighting how your product or service can help them achieve their goals or fill their needs. Like this one in how you can improve your blogs ranking fast.

• Link to your landing pages to get people to fill out your forms.

Excellent content helps show off your value and knowledge – an amazing blog that is consistent with both the quality and the regularity of blog posts can also help establish you as a thought leader in your industry.

Blogging is one of the most cost-effective long-term strategies

One of the main reasons why blogging is such a cost-effective strategy is that it drives results in the long term. Just one good blog post can help you drive results (traffic and leads) for months, even years, to come.

That’s because even after you’ve finished promoting your blog posts (even though you should constantly work on older blogs to keep it up to date), blog posts don’t disappear – they start ranking in search results and they can still get shares from random readers and much more SEO factors.

Always striving to create evergreen content (content that remains relevant over long periods with few changes/revisions, for months or even years). These types of blog posts will continue to drive results for very long periods and you’ll only need to make a few changes along the way to make sure they’re still relevant.

For example, if you were to write a blog post about the latest Instagram update, that might get actually a bit of notice the first few days or weeks, but it will be completely forgotten by the next update. On the other hand, if you write a comprehensive ‘how-to’ guide on Facebook marketing for bloggers, that could potentially remain consistent for years.

These are just three main benefits of using blogging for business and lead generation – it really is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools for businesses.