It’s funny how so many of us dream of publishing a best-selling book that tells our story of rags to riches and catapults the name of our business (and our own name even) into international renown. The problem we often find though is that there doesn’t even seem to be enough time in the day to live out that rags to riches story, let alone write a book about it! We try to sit down and put pen to paper and then a family member needs help with their homework, or the shopping needs doing, or you’re just plain shattered and slumping in front of the TV seems like the best option. The average book is 90,000 words long and it just seems such a long way away and …zz-zzz… asleep again.
Well, if you have harboured this apparently impossible dream and you are a busy entrepreneur, here’s an idea: Why don’t you start blogging? It’s a lot easier to write a blog of 1,000 words than a book of 90,000.
You can then use the material from your regular blog to become the basis of your future rags to riches story. Writing about the lessons that you have learnt throughout your time in business will come naturally to you and be a source of encouragement to others. These are the stories that people like to read. Everyone wants to hear that it is possible to overcome the obstacles that they are themselves facing.
And… even if you don’t want to publish a bestseller, blogging is a great idea in itself!
Hubspot found that businesses that blogged grew more and expanded their reach. They found that B2B marketers that blogged got 67% more leads than those that didn’t. So if you are short of time you can pay people to help you to blog consistently. Incidentally, I found that I only used the blogs I had written myself when I put my book together and you’ll probably find the same.
Books aside though, here are the top ten reasons why you should start blogging (if you haven’t already):
1. Blogging drives traffic to your site
Blogging drives traffic to your website and increases your SEO. The more you blog, the more content the search engines have to crawl and index.
2. Blogging supercharges your website’s SEO
Blogging on your website tells Google it’s an active site and also boosts how often a search term will appear on your website. You’ll be able to include all those niche long tail keywords to optimise the copy for your business. By adding internal and external links, you can increase your sites’ ranking further still.
3. Blogging attracts relevant people to your site
People searching Google for answers to their questions will come across your website if you have added content to your blog that answer their questions. It’s like the online version of handing out a sample – purchases will follow.
4. Blogging builds credibility and trust
A blog with useful content shows your audience and customers that you can be trusted. (And we all have an emotional need to trust people by the way, so you’ll be fulfilling customer needs on several levels.) Writing posts about topics people will find interesting and helpful shows them that you care about spreading useful information and at the same time you are demonstrating a high level of customer service.
5. Blogging helps you with social media posting
A blog gives you great content to post from and brings people back to your website and with this kind of targeted audience, brand awareness will grow.
6. Blogging grows your email list
Include sign up fields on blogs for people who are interested in the current topic and would like to be informed of similar content. If your blog readers opt-in to your email list, they’re giving you permission to market your business to them; take them up on it.
7. Blogging demonstrates your expertise (and your commitment)
Your blog can keep your customer base abreast of new changes to your service or products, Without a blog, a website can come across as functional and not lively enough to demonstrate real expertise. Consistent blogging requires some dedication. To be effective each post should be about 1,000 words minimum, have a catchy title (with thought given to SEO), relevant SEO key words built in, an image or two and social posts to accompany its publication on your website.
8. Blogging establishes your authority
You might not be quite ready to write a best selling book but a blog is a good way to start sharing your expertise to add value.
9. Blogging increases brand awareness
If you stick to a consistent “look” to your social images (fonts, colours image styles, icons, etc.) and stay on-brand, it’ll shorten the time it takes for your dream clients to recognise and trust you. Once that happens, they become even more likely to notice when you’re sharing something.
10. Blogging helps you to learn what your customers REALLY want and need
Learning more about what your customers expect and need from your business based on the content they respond to can be transformational. As every blog post you write is tied to a specific call to action, this kind of marketing to your target audience is really focussed!
All that said, you might still be thinking, I just don’t have time to do this! Not a problem. We can help you. Cre8ion have experienced bloggers in the copywriting team and we can research key words and phrases to use for SEO. It might be that you can blog monthly yourself and you just need some help to cover one other blog per month so that you have a regular fortnightly offering. Or maybe you want to hand the whole job over, lock stock and barrel and have a weekly blog written for you. You can provide us with the topics and we’ll put together a blogging strategy to take you forward. Contact us today.