Why Should I Write a Blog?
Let's answer the obvious question first... "What's a blog?"... well, it could just be your business' best friend.
A blog is generally seen as an area to write any articles, thoughts, facts, offers, news, events... heck, anything you can think of that in some way has a connection to you and your business. It's an endless list of as many web pages as you care to create, each with an entry date, that appears on your website. Essentially it's a "dear diary" about your business.
So on to the next question - "Why should you use blogging as a marketing tactic for your business?". Many people say to me that "we don't have time to write news articles" and I can completely understand that. But then you need to ask the question "Why do we have [or want to have] a website at all?".
Almost always the answer to that question is to drive customers to you, rather than your competitor. So to make the most of that resource, you really need to ensure that your website stands out from the crowd, hits those top results in Search Result Pages (SERPS) and draws more visits to your website.
"Why does a blog or news page help?" - easy, it's recently added content. The Internet is moving and expanding at a million km an hour and filling up with old junk. And yet when you type in to Google "latest news" and it brings up today's news headlines, or at least popular headlines from this week, rather than headlines from June 1999.
A similar thing happens when people search for things relating to your business. Although the core pages of your website are relevant and authoritative, new content with a connection to a Google search is seen as important too. If a website is rolling out new, interesting and authoritative content every day, the odds are that those pages will appear frequently in Google search. ...AND (here's the clever bit) because those pages link back to your original pages too, you're making them even more important than they were before... Win-Win!
"So what do you do next?" - Work out how you can start blogging. You can blog within your website if it has the facility already; log in via your Content Management System and write some articles. And if not then you can either upgrade your website to incorporate a blog, or you can have a blog set up externally (in other words on a different web address), then create links back to your main website in each article you write. Simples!
So now the hardest bit - "What do I write about?". Well, since you [hopefully] know a lot about your business, then that's going to be a topic that you can tell people about. Choose some aspects of what you do and write about that. You're a gun salesman? Tell people about how to skin a deer. You repair car windscreens? Write an article on what you can do if you get a stone-chip on your car. Maybe you are a wine-maker? Write an article on what wine goes with what food. You're a web designer? Well I'd just write this article.
Article published Saturday 7th of November 2015
