For some reason, only a small number of small businesses get the fact that blogging is good for marketing. But it really is the best way to get your website performing in the search engines.
This video shares with you the thinking behind this and how you can leverage your blog for marketing purposes:
In my web design business we always encouraged our clients to start writing blog posts.
The main reason is that Google loves websites with regularly updated blogs on them.
If you're blogging more regularly and consistently than your competitors then it's only a matter of time before your website starts out-performing the others.
You see, less than 5% of small businesses (including the self-employed) write regular blog posts. That's right, less than 1 in 20. And there are 2 key reasons why they don't. 1; they don't feel that they have the time. 2; they don't really see a blog as an important marketing activity.
So, the first reason why blogging is good for marketing is that a blog is very good for SEO (how your website performs in the search engines).
Another biggie is that a blog gives you content to share out on your social media.
And this works even better if you use a plugin to automatically share your blog posts out to your social channels on a regular basis. On this site we use Revive Old Posts (https://wordpress.org/plugins/tweet-old-post) which is free and works really well.
A blog is also very useful to help you establish credibility in the minds of your target audience, especially if you sell to other businesses.
You can write articles, opinion pieces, case-studies, instructional content (how-to's), testimonials and loads more besides. They key thing is to make it relevant to your market.
Alright, you've realised that you need to write blog posts but how often should you write a post?
I've always recommended a minimum once a week. More if you can but weekly will do fine.
Over the space of a year you'll have more than 50 posts, which is likely to be more than almost all of your local competition.
You should aim to write 500 words per post but it's more about posting consistently than it is about meeting a minimum word count.
If you use wordpress as your website software, along with the Yoast SEO plugin, then you can keep tabs on how many words you've written and how the search engines will likely view your blog post.
Building Credibility
Some else that a blog is useful for is sharing with potential clients to establish your credibility.
If you've written some great content, which shows that you know your stuff, you can send this to someone who is considering buying from you and this helps to build confidence in you as a specialist.
Email Content Made Easy
Regular blog posts also make it easy to come up with regular content to email out to your lists.
Email marketing has a huge ROI and blogging gives you plenty of stuff to send.
Again, this is a credibility building exercise but it will also generate leads as your expertise becomes recognised.
So, hopefully you're convinced that blogging is good for marketing but if you have question then just let us know in the comments below.
Want more on marketing? Check out:
The best bit of marketing advice EVER (article)
Blogging made easy – Get those blog posts written in less time (Article with video)