7 Reasons You Should Start a Blog for Your Business and 5 Tips on How to Do It
In an age where you can easily create and share content for free on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Medium is having your own blog still a worthwhile endeavour for businesses today?
I’m regularly asked this question by both large and small business owners and my answer is always a resounding YES!
There are many good reasons to create content online to help grow your business and in my opinion one of the best ways to publish that content is still a blog which you host on your own domain.
In this article I want to present you with some of those arguments and suggest how to go about starting a blog of your own.
7 Reasons Why You Should Start a Blog
There are lots of good reasons to blog.
1. Blogs Build Authority - create regular helpful content that shows you know your topic well and that enhances the lives of those who read it and they’ll come to see you as an authority in your industry.
2. Blogs tend to rank well in Search Results - if you are struggling to get your website to rank in Google then a blog might help to boost your rankings. Search engines like lots of fresh content - create it on your own domain on a blog and it potentially helps your whole site rank better.
3. Blogs give Fuel to Your Social Media Strategy - looking for something to share on your social media accounts? A blog will provide you with content that is not only relevant but that takes people to your own site! Not only that but you’ll find other people will likely share it on their social media accounts too!
4. Blogs Generate Leads - as a result of the fresh traffic coming from search engines and social media your blog will be helping your business to get in front of new potential customers for your business. The key is to hook these new visitors into subscribing to your email list. Create an ‘opt-in’ where by you invite people to subscribe to your email list in exchange for a small free gift (like a small eBook) relating to your blog content and you’ll have a fresh batch of leads for your business.
5. Blogs Convert Leads - blogs have the potential to not only get new eyeballs but to convert first time visitors into ongoing readers and potentially into customers. Once people subscribe to your email list send them to the fresh content you publish on your blog. This content builds the relationship, establishes trust and credibility and has the potential to lead to sales and loyal customers.
6. Blogs Personalise your Brand - create content that tells the story of your business and staff and your readers begin to feel like they KNOW you on a deeper level. You’ll no longer be just a logo to them but a more personalised brand.
7. Blogs Help You Be Known, Liked and Trusted - Bob Burg once famously said ‘People will do business and refer business to those people that they know, like and trust.’ In my 14 years of blogging this is really what it boils down to. When you create great content on your blog people begin to feel like they know, like and trust you. Only good things follow when this starts to happen!
5 Quick Tips for Starting a Blog
A lot can be said about how to start a blog and then how to grow it - in fact I’ve dedicated the last 12 years of my life to creating ProBlogger.com with thousands of tutorials on the topic - but for those starting out here are a few quick places to start.
1. Create a Blog On Your Own Domain with a Hosted Blogging Platform
There are many blogging tools but I would highly recommend that you use WordPress.org or another tool that allows you to set up your blog on your own domain and servers. This gives you ultimate control over your blog’s design and future direction. It also helps you to boost your Search Engine Results.
I’ve written a 5 step tutorial on how to start a blog which goes into more detail on this but if you have a web designer for your business site they should be able to help you to start up your blog.
2. Consider Who Your Blog is For
Your blog will only help you in some of the above ways if you write content that helps people in some way and to do that you need to understand who you are writing for and what their needs are.
Spend a little time creating a ‘reader avatar’ that describes your ideal reader. When I start a blog this is usually a simple document of 500 or so words that describes my ideal readers demographics, situation and characteristics but more importantly their needs, problems, desires, challenges, dreams, fears, questions, goals and passions.
By creating this picture of your reader you should already be thinking about the kind of content that will serve them (ie solve their problems, help them reach their goals, enable them to overcome their obstacles).
In most businesses cases the ideal reader is a potential customer - so you might even like to talk to or survey some of your existing customers to understand what makes them tick.
3. Create an Editorial Calendar
Take your reader avatar and begin to brainstorm topics that you could create content on. Pay particular attention to the questions your reader/customer might ask - these FAQs will be what they are searching Google for and can bring you a lot of new traffic.
Don’t make your blog just about what you do and what you sell - make it about solving the problems your customers have. Lead with this and you’ll open opportunity to sell later once the relationship has started.
Brainstorm as many topics as you can and then slot them into an editorial calendar.
You need not blog every day - the key is to find a regular rhythm. You might start with 1-2 posts per week for instance. Your readers will begin to notice your rhythm so it’s important to stick to it and not try to bite off more than you can chew. You can always increase your publishing schedule later.
You might also like to try to mix up types of content. For example on my blogs we try to publish 3 types of content each week - content that is informs (how to posts), inspires (stories) and interacts (discussion type posts).
Another thing I’ve seen businesses do to help them get into the rhythm of posting is to allocate different formats of posts to different days.
For example Monday might be a day where the content asks an FAQ. Wednesday might be a day when the post is a case study and Friday might be an interview with a staff member or an influential person in the industry.
4. Give Someone Editorial Control
Many businesses start blogs but see them quickly fall over. The #1 reason for this is that nobody is driving it and everyone in the business is looking to everyone else to make it happen.
Give someone editorial control and the responsibility to make sure that content is written and published.
This doesn’t mean that person needs to write everything. In know of one business who gave this editorial control to their receptionist. She wrote no content at all but was given the task of reminding other staff members when their articles were due, proof reading, scheduling publishing of posts and promoting them on social media.
It’s important that time be allocated for both the creation of content and the completion of it. So whether it’s all being done by one person or different members of a team do different parts - diarise the tasks and make it a priority. Great content doesn’t just happen - it takes time.
5. Track and Evaluate
I highly recommend installing Google Analytics onto your blog so that you can track the success of your posts in terms of traffic. You will learn a lot about how to blog simply by watching to see how people interact with your content.
In time you’ll begin to notice some topics are more popular than others which will give you hints as to what to create more of.
You’ll also hopefully begin to hear from readers via comments, social media and email which can help you to identify what they find useful too.
Experiment with differnet types of posts in the early days and evolve your approach.
Bonus Tips and Further Learning:
- I brainstormed 180 blog post ideas that you might find useful in coming up with content for your blog. Sign up to recieve 30 ideas each month for the next 6 months here for free.
- One of the best types of content that you can create is storytelling content. I’ve created a list of 14 types of stories in this episode of my podcast to help you to do this.
- One of my favorite tools for tracking how my content is being shared and for finding new content idea is BuzzSumo.com. You can add your domain and it’ll show you your most shared posts but you can also do it for any other domain or any keyword to see what others are creating.
Meet the business
Darren Rowse started blogging in 2002 as a hobby but quickly grew his blogs into a business by creating blogs at ProBlogger.com and Digital-Photography-School.com. He also runs Australia’s biggest blogging conference - the ProBlogger Training Event and has a twice weekly podcast on iTunes.