Do You Need To Blog?

Does your business need to have a blog?

It’s a question that many people ask – should you blog? and the answer is, as always when it comes to the web – it depends (despite what some people say). Like all things about web strategy you can find people writing impassioned arguments for both sides of things, from blogging is dead to blogging is the best thing you can do for your business.

So what view is correct? It depends on the totality of what you are doing to engage customers and potential customers, both online and offline. It depends on the amount of time you have to devote to such activities such as blogging. For any business where the core function of the business is not blogging, blogging comes under the category of marketing.

All businesses need to balance marketing activities and doing the actual work that brings in dollars. If you have other marketing strategies are bringing in plenty of business, it may be that blogging, if you are writing the blog yourself is simply too time consuming for you to consider it to be worthwhile. Alternatively, blogging could be something you find is excellent for drviving customer engagement and brand awareness.

The first question to ask about blogging is why? Well from my point of view, there are two major reasons why you might want to blog.

Firstly there is brand awareness. You want to establish yourself who knows a little bit about your particular niche. Blogging about topics that are your particular area of expertise show this to your audience.

Now with this, there is one caveat. Certainly in my area of expertise, there are many opinions. When it comes to SEO and social media engagement, for every opinion you put forward, there are people out there who will say, ‘you’re wrong’. Really? How can an opinion be wrong?

It doesn’t matter what your opinion is, there is someone who will take the opposite position. If you say social media engagement is essential for small business, there will be people say, “No it’s not”, and they can show you all this information as to why you’re wrong.

If you take the opposite opinion, there will be people who come out and say, “How dare you question the current marketing orthodoxy that social media is the way to go?”.

So my caveat is that you have to be bold enough to put your opinions out there and have them howled down. Sometimes it’s not for the faint hearted.

But apart from brand awareness, there is a bigger, much bigger reason in my opinion – Google. Google loves sites with new content. It also loves sites that are visited frequently. If you have visitors to your website that come to read your blog, it improves your search engine rankings.

Neil Patel, who has apparently managed to position himself as a name in SEO, has a few interesting things to say on this subject. Just one snippet from his article is that 70% of consumers learn about a company through its blog versus ads. To me that is enough to continue to blog. You can read his blog post here.

There’s enough value there for me to continue to blog, but like I say every time about anything to do with Internet based marketing – measure the results. If you aren’t getting results, why invest the time and effort?

 

4 Reasons Why You Should Have A Blog On Your Website

Blogs

Blogs are everywhere these days. There are a few big reasons for this. They are reasons that you as a business can’t afford to ignore. 

Firstly we know that the marketing of any business is a numbers game. You want people coming to your site. It works like this (sorry for those who already know this) – The more visitors you get to you site, the more contacts you can potentially make, which can then turn into leads and of course finally turn into customers.

Now to further this aim you need to have something that gets visitors to your site, and also gets visitors coming back. One of the big things about marketing is keeping your name prominent in the minds of potential customers. They may know of you, but then you go to the back of their mind as a competitor who has more prominent and persistent marketing is the person they call, simply because their name is at the front of the customer’s mind and yours is at the back. It’s why all big brands (for example Coca Cola) still spend large amounts on advertising.

So if you are writing good content on your blog that people want to read, interesting and engaging content, people will keep coming back. Over time you will develop an audience and that will keep coming back and keep your site fresh in the minds of potential customers.

Secondly, Google likes fresh content. A lot. Having fresh content added to your website tells Google that the site is live and active. You go up the search rankings over time when your site is regularly updated.

Thirdly Google also likes traffic. It’s a cycle. The more traffic that you get to your site, the higher your site goes up the Google rankings. Google wants to deliver to the people who are searching for a product or a service the search results that are most relevant to them. More traffic to a site is an indicator that people want to see this site.

Finally a well written blog, a blog that is informative to people on the subject matter of your chosen field allows people to feel comfortable that you are skilled in your field. This can’t be underestimated. People want to hire someone who knows that they are talking about. They want to hire someone they can feel comfortable with to do a good job. A blog full of relevant information  lets people know that.

Lastly a plug. If you need a hand setting up a blog for your website, I can help.