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?
Shaun
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