So you’re probably wondering whether you should start a blog for your business. Regardless of the size of your business, when you start a business blog, it would be treated as a marketing tool. This means if you plan it well, it should fit nicely into your marketing plans and assist with business growth.
Five reasons to start a blog for your business
Here are the top five reasons why I strongly recommend that you start a business blog, especially if you want to attract more customers online. A business blog attached to your website:
- Portrays you or your business as an expert. You’ll be showing off your skills and knowledge with quality content written for your niche market. When existing or prospective customers land on your blog, they’ll see right away that you know your stuff. Who do you want them to go to next time they need tips or opinion on a topic? You of course, not the other guy!
- Helps you to communicate with your customers. Other than the opportunity to write problem-solving blog posts, you have the flexibility to talk about your brand, your team, your services or products, the work you’re doing in the community and whatever else of interest to readers. It’s a great way to let them get to know the people behind your business.
- Gives customers something to talk about. When you’ve written share-worthy content about the brand, your solutions and the awesome things you’re doing, customers will share your blog posts with people in their networks – including people who could be your potential customers. Imagine the number of new eyeballs you could be receiving!
- Provides content to use in social media campaigns. Facebook is an example of a social media network offering the opportunity to use your blog posts to share with your fans and your fans’ friends. You could reach a much wider audience, especially if you share with other members of the forums and media groups you belong to.
- Publishes content to help boost your SEO. Google and other search engines look for new relevant content to serve to people who are searching for solutions like yours. If your website is completely static and struggling to rise above the competition, adding a blog can help boost your ranking. Use the keywords you want to rank for and you’ll receive more traffic as people discover your blog posts.
How to start a blog for your business
If you’re planning a new website, ask your website developer to add a blog to it. If possible, I recommend asking for a self-hosted WordPress blog. WordPress is a platform that’s very easy to learn and use, and is very flexible. My website runs on WordPress. I can modify the layout, colours and elements to suit my needs.
Once your blog is set up by a professional (or yourself if you have the skills), here’s what you need to do when you’re starting a blog for your business:
- Decide why you’ll be blogging. What’s your vision for your blog? What are you trying to achieve with it and what are your objectives? Are you looking to boost ranking, increase sales or encourage more engagement?
- Do your research and write a plan. If you don’t know what your customers want to read, send out an email or post an update on social media to ask them for some suggestions. Ask them to let you know which topics they would like to read about and what problems they’re facing. How can you be a hero to your customers?
- Develop your content calendar. When you’re starting a blog, it’s a good idea to plan your topics at least a month in advance. That is, to map out the dates and topics for each post. Your topics could coincide with events within with your business (e.g. the launch of a new service or product) or anything happening in the world (e.g. within the industry). Mix up your types of posts to include newsy and evergreen content.
- Decide on your style. Write your content. Writing styles should really reflect your personality or your brand personality. Having said that, you want to remain professional and you want to write content that help you enhance your credibility as an expert. You also want to write in the tone and voice that your customers will enjoy. Writing could be the toughest part of blogging. That’s why some clients request blog content from me weeks in advance.
- Deliver your blog posts via social media and email. You don’t have to join every single social media channel or content sharing tool out there. Do some research on the most suitable tools for you to use in your content distribution. You could start with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon. Don’t forget your mailing list!
If you want to start a blog for business but don’t have the time, energy or skills to blog, feel free to get in touch and to let me know how I can help you. If topics are the main issue for you, steal some of my blog topic ideas. You can also let me know via email and we could start creating a list of topics and keywords to guide your blogging.
If you recently started to blog, let me know in the comments below and I’ll visit your blog.
I definitely like all five of your reasons Rhonda!
And what you shared about writing in your own voice is equally important too!
And I just bet you get tons of requests from business owners or service provider, that would probably not be bothered, trying to consistently come up with their own content and therefore turn to experts like yourself.
And as you mentioned, (if at all possible), adding a blog component to your static website and consistently adding fresh relevant content to it, is a proven strategy, for gradually boosting your organic search traffic.
Great post!thanks for sharing it!