Why your business needs a blog 💻
Q: People have recommended that I start a blog on my website; why is this something people recommend, and how will this help my business?
Blogging is a great way to grow your business, build trust with customers/potential customers and become an authority in your space. I highly recommend writing a blog for any business and then promoting it to your audience.
Blogging extends your organic reach
Writing a blog is a great way to grow your business because you’re creating more ways people can find your business.
From a purely organic or search engine perspective, you create more valuable resources that customers want to use or read. Once you publish (and index) your new blog content, search engines like Google can take those pages and display them to more people.
Let’s use an example.
You just started a party planning business and you want to get more customers to order your services. By writing a blog about party planning topics, your audience will be able to find your website by searching for party planning-related searches.
If you write a blog about how to throw a princess-themed birthday party for little girls, then when people are searching for birthday party ideas or princess birthday party topics, your article can show up in search results. You provide some ideas but also offer your services. Some people will take some of your ideas and throw their own party, but some will take you up on your offer to plan and throw their parties and you’ll have gained new business at the cost of your time and a little writing. That’s a low-cost acquisition strategy with a far reach.
Blogging builds a relationship between you and potential customers while helping establish your brand or business as an authority
One of the most important benefits of a blog is building a relationship of trust between your business and your customers or potential customers.
When a potential customer is doing the research before making a purchase, they build relationships with everyone who helps teach and educate them, and these relationships go a long way when a customer is ready to make a purchase.
A well-written blog that answers customer questions builds trust and shows customers that you are an authority in your space and understand the customer journey.
Let’s use another example.
Ben works at a financial planning business and wants to help educate and inform potential customers, all while establishing his business as an authority.
Ben knows the most common questions and most frequent user journeys for people who become customers of his business. So he decides to write blogs that answer questions at every step of the user journey.
When Paul, who is interested in financial planning but doesn’t know where to start, searches for general information about financial planning Ben’s blog shows up and offers some general information about financial planning.
After Paul reads this, he has some new questions that are more specific about a product or his unique scenario. Ben can write blogs that answer these questions, again building trust and creating another touch point with his potential customer.
Once Paul has read a few blogs and has a decent idea of what financial planning is, he’s ready to contact someone and make a purchase. When he searches for “financial planners near me” or “best financial planner in my area” Ben’s company shows up. Paul will recognize Ben’s company from all the well written articles that taught him about financial planning and already have a relationship with Ben’s business. It then becomes a straightforward choice to work with Ben and his company.
By writing a blog and having a thoughtful and intentional blog strategy, Ben could acquire new customers and build trust before any conversation had ever happened.
Blogging can be monetized in multiple ways down the road
There are multiple ways to make money from a blog, only one of them is getting new customers. This topic is something I’ll explore in another post, but a few of the ways you can make money from your blog are:
Affiliate marketing
Advertising
Paid content
Online courses
Memberships
Donations
Q: What should I blog about?
Answer customer questions
One of the best recommendations I can give new bloggers is to answer customer questions.
When someone gets on the phone with you about buying, what questions do they ask?
If you run a party planning company, people might ask about pricing and services. In that case, you could write a blog about what you offer and how much it costs. You could even write a more specific post about a particular type of party you offer.
Maybe they ask about your planning strategy if you're a financial planner. So you write about that.
Generally, just be helpful and try to simplify the buying process for your customers. Anytime something happens in the buying process that makes it harder for a customer to make a purchase, the chances of a purchase happening are lower. This is called reducing buyer friction, simplifying the buyer journey, or making it easier for someone to buy.
The easier it is to buy, the more likely people will buy.
Write about how your product or service solves a particular problem
One of my favorite blog styles is showcasing how your product or service solves a problem. Ahrefs has a blog that does this spectacularly.
Ahrefs knows what problems their customers have and what problems their product solves, so the content they write is focused on how to solve a customer problem with their product.
This type of content is genius because it gives the customer who is searching for an answer to their problem a solution that’s focused on the product Ahrefs offers.
If you’re the party planner again, you could write about common pitfalls when throwing a party and explain how your service can help customers avoid those pitfalls.
Conclusion
Writing a blog in today’s day and age is table stakes for a successful business, especially for small and medium businesses that want to rise above the competition. Writing a blog builds trust, establishes authority, and is generally helpful to your customers.
If you aren’t writing a blog for your business today, you’re missing out on an enormously profitable and effective (not to mention cheap) channel for growing your business.
My last note is once you’ve got a blog written, don’t forget that you have to put it in front of people. Distribution is a crucial part of blog success, I’ll write another post on this later too, but some of your best distribution channels can be social media and email.
Happy blogging and if you like the content, please subscribe (it’s free)!