Does Your Business Need a Blog?
Chances are, if you have a small business, you've been told you need a blog. Perhaps you have one. You've written some articles, shared your wisdom, given some inside peeks on what's going on at your company. You're authentic, you're using keywords, your images are on point. You're spending a lot of time on your blog posts, and you're getting... crickets. Or perhaps worse, you're getting lots and lots of traffic, but no conversions. No email signups, no sales - just traffic.
As a marketer who works on a lot of clients' blogs, today I'm daring to ask the question: do you really need one? Check out the five problems that lead to business owners wasting time and money blogging without any results - and how to solve for them.
1. You don't have time
By now, most people understand that blogging is the long tail of inbound marketing. It can pay off big dividends in the end, or if you're lucky/smart/awesome, a single post can light on fire for years and bring you half your business's leads (unlikely, although we can all dream!). If you have limited time, we always encourage our clients to focus on revenue-generating activity. That's stuff that can create momentum and ramp up FAST - we tend to find that, especially at first, blogging is a slow burn.
Solution: Prioritize the things that will move your business forward in the short term, and plan for the long term. Hold off on blogging for now, or outsource the blogging and blog strategy so that you get the benefits, but it's not a distraction to your more immediate business needs.
2. You don't have a distribution channel
While it would be great if we could just throw blog content onto our website and automatically generate organic traffic, the chances of it happening are slim to none. Writing a blog is the easy part; getting readers can be tougher. For most small businesses, email lists or social media are key opportunities to distribute content. If you're using social, you'll want to build in a budget for boosting your content to amplify its reach.
Solution: Start to build an email list using a lead magnet (a downloadable freebie) that you only have to create once, not daily or weekly as you would with blog content. Or, consider investing in social media ads to promote your content and build your list.
3. You don't have a mission
If you don't have a plan or purpose to your blog, do not - I repeat, do not - start it. The mission of your blog can vary. Here on the SHC blog, we don't do a lot of amplification. We intend our blog as a resource for current and potential clients who are checking us out to learn a thing or two and get acquainted with us. The goal is simple and it informs our writing. Other missions include converting customers into leads (with CTAs to subscribe to an email list) or customers (with purchase/download CTAs), driving traffic to your site through interesting content (which is likely only successful if it's amplified), or helping your SEO (via specific strategies around backlinking and keywords).
Solution: Plan first. Think about what you want your blog or content to achieve and write those goals down. As you develop your editorial calendar, ask yourself whether you're meeting those goals with each and every post.
4. You don't have anything new to say
Listen, there's nothing totally new, but if you (personally or as a business) can't bring your own spin or perspective to a topic, there's no point in blogging about it. Here at SHC, we do everything through the lens of a smaller business, because that's what we are, and that's who our clients are. Think about your company values and mission, and how your content can further those. Whether that's informing your audience about things you know they care about, talking about your business values or highlighting partnerships, you always want your blog to feel like "you," not like a generic series of content.
Solution: Write down your business's differentiators and the value you bring to the table for readers. Then, use that information to plan out blog topics that let those areas shine.
5. You haven't optimized your blog for lead generation
Blogging is a "top of the funnel" activity. This means that as far as sales funnels go, a prospect will rarely buy just because of a single blog post. So if you haven't optimized your website to capture these leads, do that first. Then, you can blog.
Solution: Figure out what your lead strategy is before you start to blog, then test and tweak so that your blog is a business generating tool. You can tell if your lead capture strategy is working by checking out the bounce rate on your blog pages (that's how many people visit just one page of your site) or setting up a conversion for a lead in Google Analytics and seeing how your blog performs there.
