Unless you’re someone who naturally enjoys writing, the idea of publishing a blog may send cold chills down your spine, (not to mention, seem like an unreachable and downright daunting feat.) It may not seem immediately apparent how and why to start a blog.
Plus, if you’re a business owner, you’ve got a lot on your plate besides marketing. You may understand the reasons for publishing regularly, but writing articles and posting on social media, somehow consistently falls to the bottom of the list of things to do.
Even if you’ve considered including a blog on your website, there are many objections that can get in the way. Here are a few I’ve encountered from myself and from other business owners and marketers.
- I don’t have the time!
- I don’t know what to write about.
- I don’t like to write.
- I don’t know if I write well enough to publish on our website
- We wrote a few blogs and got absolutely no results!
- My business is retail (or financial, insurance, construction, etc.) How would blogging help us get more local business?
Sound familiar? None of these reasons hold water in the face of the business benefits of publishing content regularly on your business website – especially for local business.
Here are five really good reasons to start blogging right now.
- Blogging helps drive traffic to your website, and your business. Each blog is one more page for the search engines to index and show in search results. The data proves that the more blog articles a website has, the more traffic it receives.
- Blogging helps convert traffic to leads. Every blog article is an opportunity to generate more leads by adding a lead-generating Call-to-Action button. Your article may just get the reader started and leave them looking for more. Offering more information for download is an excellent way to capture contact information – and generate a lead.
- Blogging helps establish your authority in your industry. The best business blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes. This is a particularly handy tool for Sales and Service professionals.
- Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that people can share on social networks — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest — which helps expose your business to a new audience that may not know you yet.
- Blogging drives long-term results. Of all the ways you can drive traffic to your website, such as pay-per-click advertising, email campaigns, social media posting, blogging is the one strategy where effectiveness increases over time.
Most other strategies give immediate, short-lived burst in results, and once they are done, the results are done too. Blog articles, on the other hand, continue to live on your website. Data shows that about 10% of articles continue to drive more traffic the longer they have been published. (They are known as compounding blogs.)
As it turns out, blogging is the best investment of any marketing activity because it’s the only one that keeps producing results over and over.
Blogging is at the heart of the Inbound Marketing methodology that marketers are finding produces significantly more ROI than the old, traditional, outbound marketing strategies.
Next Steps and More Resources
The first step is to get started blogging (or restart, if you’ve stopped.) It’s never too late. Not sure where to get help or how to get over those obstacles to getting started? Here are a few resources:
- The Marketing Monsoon Blog. Two articles you may find of interest are: “How and Why to Start a Blog for Your Business” and “11 Best Blogging Tools to Unlock Your Productivity.”
- For more hands-on help, check out the Business Blogging Boot Camp, a half-day workshop starting in June, 2017 that will help you get your blog going and set you up for success.
Author:
Jayne Burch, Chief Marketing Strategist
Marketing Monsoon
“We Turn Your Lazy Website into a Lead Generation Engine”
www.MarketingMonsoon.com