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7 Blogging in the Age of Modern Marketing Thought Leadership Great content produces authority and trust with your audience. Over time, your readers will associate your in- teresting, relevant, and informative content with your brand. Building this rapport and relationship with your au- dience is invaluable as you work to drive these people further down the funnel. Qualified Leads Assuming that your blog lives on your company's website (which it definitely should), your content will ultimately pull a targeted audience of potential buyers directly to your website! Sounds pretty awesome, right? Forget for a moment the significant SEO ben- efits that this traffic will bring – you've ultimately got a group of people on your website that you've identified as being your target audience (as determined by your strategic content creation), who now trust your brand as a thought- leader, and have a gaping problem/pain point in their lives that your product/service can solve. Yes – done correctly, your blog can be a signif- icant driver of leads for your company! Another way to think of blogging (and content marketing as a whole), is as a relationship. Through your content, you're taking the time to build a relationship with your audience, showing them that you understand who they are, what they're interested in, what they're struggling with, and why they can trust you. Unlike the old school hard-sales approach (does a used-car salesman come to mind?), content marketing and blogging is all about building a genuine relationship with your audience – one that's built on a strong foundation of trust and reliability. Instead of trying to hit a home run on the first date, content marketing is a long term approach that is built off layers of conversation and trust. When a connection is built and a relationship secured (i.e. a lead is generated), you can bet it's been built out of love, not infatuation... or coercion. 3. 4.

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