If you haven’t been living under a rock, you already know that blogging can improve your website’s SEO. And I’m sure you know it can help you build your email list.

But the advantages don’t stop there.

When evaluating their blog strategy, most people gloss over three important things that can give their business the upper hand. These three advantages happen behind the scenes and can help you improve your business — if you let them.

Blogging helps you discover your brand voice.

“Your unique voice comes from knowing who you are, and who you are not,” says Ahava Leibtag, owner of Aha Media Group. You don’t create your brand voice, you discover it.

You already have a brand voice, you might just not know what it is yet. Consider the tone in your communication with clients. Are you more formal or casual?

What kind of language do you use with prospects? Is it simple and easy to digest or filled with jargon and complex?

If you were to tell two people to write a post on the benefits of blogging, like this one, look at just a few of the approaches they could take.

• An educational post that teaches people about each benefit
• A sales-driven post, selling each benefit
• An entertaining post meant for easy reading with a big list of benefits.

You might discover that your brand’s voice is highly inconsistent across different departments and people. In other words, your marketing department might be communicating one while your sales department is communicating something completely different. That’s not good.

Blogging forces you to think through the things you wouldn’t normally encounter in daily operations.

Blogging creates a wealth of marketing collateral.

There are many business owners who still think blogging is a waste of time and resources. And I would totally agree if your blog posts only lived on your blog.

But they don’t.

The beautiful thing about blog posts is they are an instant way to get feedback from your audience. You can easily gauge whether a message should be incorporated into other pieces of your marketing and sales.

Here’s an example from my own blog. I wanted to test whether or not a concept I created about “training your website to be your best salesperson” resonated with my audience. I wrote a blog post and published it on my own blog and on LinkedIn. And it became one of my most popular articles on LinkedIn with a lot of good feedback in the comments.

After seeing this feedback, relative to the other marketing messages I have tested, I knew this one was something worth pursuing in my other marketing collateral and I used it in the copy on my website and emails.

You can also use content from your blog on your website’s services pages, marketing emails, proposals, sales pitches and even keynote presentations. Think about any relevant marketing collateral in your business and you can use it. I wrote an entire post about this a while back: Multiply Your Reach With These 8 Content Repurposing Strategies.

I receive a lot of pushback from clients thinking their audience will noticed they repurposed their content and call them out on it. I’ve thought about it a lot as well, but consider this:

Think about the amount of content you read every day.

And think about how many businesses you come into contact with every week.

Now, think about the last time that you were reading a company’s website and thought to yourself, Hey I’m pretty sure that was the same info I read on their ‘About’ page 3 weeks ago!

Unless you have an incredible photographic memory or a vendetta against that company, your answer is probably like mine: Never.

Saying I’m afraid to repurpose content is like saying I’ll only give a presentation once because someone might be in the audience twice in a row.

Or I’m only going to share this post on social media once because someone might see it multiple times.

When you find a message that resonates with your audience, don’t squander it!

If you are creating quality content with the goal of helping and educating your prospects, you won’t have any problems. (On the other hand, if you write a piece of mediocre content and plaster it everywhere, I do hope someone calls you out for it. That’s just lazy.)

Blogging takes the guesswork out of your marketing.

Imagine what would happen if the insights into exactly what your customers wanted were readily available. Sound crazy? It’s actually closer than you think.

When you create value for your customers with blog content, their feedback tells you what works and what doesn’t. Just like using a blog post to test a brand message, you can also test and target different industries, niches and problems your target audience is having.

There really is no other medium that gives feedback so quickly. By creating content intentionally with the goal of feedback, you can test a new product or service idea with a specific niche. And you can simply ask for feedback from your customers.

Blogging forces you to think through new ideas and become a better listener to your audience’s response. Having a great idea and being able to articulate it to your target audience are two completely different things. Blogging can help you navigate that process through your customers eyes.

It’s similar to what Amazon’s Jeff Bezos does for new products that haven’t been created yet. Here’s his process from a recent article in Fast Company

“Like every product created at Amazon, the Fire Phone began on a piece of paper. Or rather, several typed, single-spaced pieces of paper that contained a mock-up of a press release for the product that the company hoped to launch some day.

Bezos requires employees to write these pretend press releases before work begins on a new initiative. The point is to help them refine their ideas and distill their goals with the customer in mind. The Fire Phone plan was particularly ambitious, insiders say, with a set of objectives that seemed unrealistic even then.”

Creating a press release for nonexistent products forces you to see the big picture from your customer’s point of view. It’s the exact same thing with the products or services on your blog. Thinking through the concept from beginning to end gives you a unique perspective and valuable feedback from your audience.

Have you experienced any of these helpful side effects? Let me know in the comments!