Why Every Business Needs a Blog
Creating and regularly updating a blog is one of the best ways to build your brand and establish your credibility.
Are you sitting around waiting for customers who never come? Are you receiving leads that you can’t use? Are your promotional and marketing efforts a waste of time and money?
You can do something to get your business noticed by the right people – you can create a blog and keep it updated on a regular basis with excellent content. This provides you with a home on the web – a place where your customers and prospects can find out information about you, your services and your products.
If you don’t have a blog, then you don’t have a place on the web to present your message directly to your customers. Oh sure, you can use LinkedIn or Facebook or any other social media, but since those don’t belong to you, you are stuck with their rules, their formatting and their design. Even worse, if you do something wrong, they’ll ban your account or restrict your usage temporarily and in some cases permanently – often without any useful explanation and no appeal.
Create a WordPress blog
WordPress is by far the most useful and capable blogging platform. There are literally tens of millions of WordPress sites, and with that kind of user base, developers have created a plethora of options to add value and capabilities. Make sure you use the self-hosted version of WordPress.
To begin with, WordPress is easy to use, although it can seem overwhelming to the uninitiated at first. Most web hosts provide support for WordPress with automated installations, pre-installed tools and helpful staff. You can create your initial WordPress blog literally in minutes.
Tens of thousands of these are available to give your site exactly the look and feel that you desire. A theme is a way to change the appearance of your site without doing a lot work. You simply choose your theme, install it, and do the necessary customizations to make it look just like you want. There are both free and paid themes available. In general, it is best to choose a paid theme because then you will receive support from the vendor who created it. If something breaks, you can ask them for help.
In addition to themes, you have the choice of adding features to customize your blog exactly like you want using plugins. These are small (and sometimes large) applications that you install to add one or more features. For example, you can add a plugin to create forms to get information from your visitors.
Finally, adding articles, known as posts, is as trivial as creating a new one, writing your text, adding a few pictures or videos, then saving it.
There are many classes available at online schools such as Udemy which will teach you what you need to know in just a few hours.
Make sure you purchase a custom domain name to go along with your blog. Mot web hosts will give you the first year of your domain for free for your first year of hosting service. Siteground is an example of an excellent WordPress host.
Give a Professional look to your Blog
Your blog is your brand, and if it looks bad, then so do you. Spend the money and the time by hiring a WordPress designer and graphics artist who understands who to design WordPress web sites to create the graphics the look you want to portray.
Don’t skimp on this because you want your blog to personify your message and enhance your brand.
Take your time and find an expert that you can trust. They will find your the right theme for your brand, create the graphics to show you off professionally, and build the initial pages – the front page, about page, a contact form, and a few other pages specific to your needs. Generally, the actual text copy will NOT be written by the designer as that’s the job of a copywriter.
Once you have your blog, you’ll need to hire a copywriter to create the text for your pages. They will write the copy so that each page causes visitors to want to read, join your mailing list,and possibly purchase your services or products.
The tasks of designing a blog and writing the copy are two very different specialties and ideally you should get them done by different professionals.
Give excellent content
Once you’ve created your blog, the next step is to create excellent content on a regular basis. You must post (which mean write and add to your blog) very well written articles regularly.
This is needed because:
- Presumably you have something to say, which is why you created a blog.
- Search engines want to see new pages on your blog on a regular basis.
- New content attracts new visitors.
- The new content can be shared on social media and went out in your newsletter to get people to come to your blog.
What do I mean by excellent content?
Don’t write just to write something. The articles you create need to be extremely well written, have good grammar and spelling, and provide excellent information (or entertainment) for your visitors. It’s best to use a mixture of words, graphics and videos (YouTube is best to attract Google) to engage people who come to your site.
Don’t use content mills such as eLance, Contently, Fiverr or any of the others to create your content. Sure, you can get cheap articles, sometimes for as little as $5. However, these will be of very quality and won’t help you with the search engines or with engaging your readers.
Remember that you get what you pay for.
One of the best strategies is to engage a copywriter or a professional blogger to write an article or two a month about your subjects. Most writing professionals will give you a good discount for a longer term contract of this nature. Two articles per month is about the right minimum amount you should publish if they are of very high quality.
Why do you need to spend the effort and money to blog?
By creating an excellent blog that accurately portrays your brand, you have a standard place on the web where people can find you, and learn about you, your products, services, and knowledge. As long as you provide excellent, interesting content, you’ll attract people, and if your content is properly targeted towards your audience, those people will be qualified leads.
On my own blog, The Writing King, I get several messages a day asking about me and my services, and some of those become income producing customers. Like any marketing and branding effort, it takes time and money, but the payoff can be big and the results lucrative.
A blog is an essential component of your branding and marketing efforts. Get started today so you begin to get results immediately.
Richard is the Owner and Senior Writer for The Writing King, a bestselling author, and ghostwriter. He’s written and published 63 books, ghostwritten 40+ books, as well as hundreds of blog articles.
