Why Your Business Needs a Blog
There are so many reasons why YOU and your business need a blog and actually need to use it! I'm going to drop a few below but just know that these aren't the ONLY reasons.
Blogging is something that can mean so many things to so many different people – it can be a way to document your life, or share your story, make the world a better place, share information or get in touch with your customers/clients.
In the business world, we NEED to blog, it's sort of like an extension of our businesses and sometimes it just feels so daunting – I know that! – so, before I get into WHY you need to blog, let me just assure you that these are the only “rules” you have to follow when blogging:
- Blog on a consistent schedule (doesn't matter if it's daily, weekly, bi-weekly, whatever).
- Write blog posts that appeal to and are useful for your clients or customers.
Yup, that's it.
It doesn't have to be fancy, it doesn't have to professional, it doesn't really even have to be pretty – as long as it's informative and useful and feels good to you, it'll work.
Now, let's talk about why you NEED a blog as a business owner:
- SEO. Y'all, we're all out here trying to figure out how to get more eyeballs on our content, more people to our site, higher rankings on Google, etc but I can promise you that this one is one of the best things you can do for your SEO.Each time you publish a new post to your blog (your website), you're ‘throwing' new keywords into Google's bank of things it can find you for and, thus, increasing the likelihood for more eyeballs on your content and more customers buying your stuff.
- To help you position yourself as the expert in your industry. When you blog, you're sharing the actual knowledge in your head, you're putting it out into the world and you're letting people SEE how much you know. That's all it takes to look like an expert, that's the first step to having someone trust you and it's the first step to really becoming known for the things you do inside of your target market.When people see that you're an expert, they start to trust you, then, you share your expertness again and again and again and they trust you more and more and more. When they trust you, they buy from you – it's that simple.
- To grow your email list. Say it with me guys: “The money is in the list“.I've said it before, other experts in online marketing have said it before, you NEED to have a solid following on your email list to make the kind of money that you have the potential to make. So, it doesn't hurt at all that your blog is a GREAT way to grow your list.Use your blog posts as a way to show that you know your stuff, then provide an upgrade (I like to call these “content upgrades”) to your blog post that you KNOW people are going to want and make them sign up for your newsletter list to grab it.I've done this on this post (and on most of my posts), see below.
That's it, those are the reasons why you're basically leaving money on the table if you're not blogging. It can feel overwhelming but my biggest piece of advice is to sit down and come up with 25 topics you could blog on – if you blog once per week, you've got 1/2 the year covered. It will take you around an hour to create the content and images for your post, a little more if you do a content upgrade and even more if you do a video to go along with it but it's worth it. PROMISE.
And, if you want to hit up the video version of this post, find it below.