What is a blog and why do you need one? Let's explore some of the benefits of having a blog on your website and how it will help your business.
Blog
NounA regularly updated section of a website that is written in an informal or conversational style, roughly based around the topic of the website itself.
As always, we are concerned with the websites of our clients, the small business websites that we create have a blog/news section which can be turned on and off depending on whether the client feels able to update a blog or utilise our professional copywriting services to blog on their behalf.
We would always recommend that a website features a blog, even if you are only able to update it every few months. It's a bit like water to a flower, watering weekly is ideal but a little is better than nothing at all.
There's a big difference between a personal blog for an individual and a blog on your business website. Not only is there an added importance for a professional, tactful manner in your business blog but also the content needs to revolve around your website topic and content.
It may seem like hard work, but the advantages to your business if you start blogging are worth the time and effort you need to invest.
You can use your business blog to answer questions that you are often asked by customers, especially if these questions have indepth, long winded answers. There are two key benefits to this:
Having responses to common queries already written out can save you time and improve your conversion rate.
Blogs are great for your SEO (search engine optimisation) because they add fresh content to the website regularly and give you more scope for ranking for different keywords than your static website pages. Here's a definition of a keyword:
A word or phrase that customers may search to find your business online.
Keywords need to be supported by the content of your website, you cannot rank in Google results for terms which aren't used in the text of your website. Essentially more opportunity for text means more opportunity to include a wider variety of keywords which you could then rank for.
Get in touch if you need help with your SEO.
Your blog will give you the opportunity to show your customers that you are an expert in your niche. If you sell handmade cosmetics you can reassure your customers that you know what you're doing by blogging about the best ingredients, latest popular combinations, latest studies into the benefits of various natural ingredients versus the manufactured ingredients that large companies use.
It's your time to shine, establish your authority on all matters pertaining to what you offer your customers or clients. You may not think you know that much, but once you sit down and think about what you do in detail I'm sure there will be a huge array of topics that you can write about with authority.
We'll write a blog about how to come up with content ideas soon to help if you need some research techniques for topics.
The best thing about writing a blog is the opportunity to use the content elsewhere. Once you've bothered to get it all down on a webpage, you can reuse it in various places. You could copy it into an email newsletter and post about it on social media - this is called content marketing.
Using the content, snippets of it or links to it in your other forms of marketing will draw your other online audiences into your website - where they will hopefully find out more about you and be more likely to convert into customers or clients.
You might not get much traffic to your blog at first, but if you've written it right and got all your SEO ducks in a row it could be a driver of traffic to your website for months and years to come.
Don't expect to see results overnight, but if you persevere with blogging for your small business then you are contributing to the long term success of your company. So congratulations, you're laying the foundations for future wins.
We've given you the reasons why you should have a blog that's regularly updated, but it's back to you to work out how to get this done for your business.
If you're keen to get writing and you have a website with us then you will either have the blog/news section available in the content management system or you can ask us to set that up for you.
If the idea of blogging regularly is just too much then get in touch, we're happy to chat over your options for us to do your copywriting and what sort of frequency, length and tone your blogs should take.
There's always more to learn, we recommend these blogs:
Posted on September 14th 2020