Today’s question is, do I really need a blog? It comes from Stacy in Naperville, Illinois. I do not have any detail about her specific business challenge, so I will answer this in kind. A vague question. I can give a fairly detailed yet vague answer because I’m just that good. Just kidding you.
The big caveat I want to add here, Stacy, is, if you’re talking about doing this for yourself, you’re going to blog and you’re going to write and produce the content for your blog, versus are you asking this question because you’re thinking about hiring somebody or a marketing firm has suggested that they produce a blog for you, the answers are basically the same.
Now, as far as time is concerned, you’ll hear me talk about that a lot during this answer. As long as you understand that if someone else is doing it for you, it’s obviously not your time, that needs to be considered. However, your money and your resources then have to be considered.
The other part of that is, can they represent you properly? Can a third party represent you properly in a blog even if you are paying the money? Is the money that you would spend on a marketing firm providing that service to you worth the value of having a blog? If you really wanted an answer for your specific situation, I would want that little piece of information there.
When you hear my answer from here on out, just take that into consideration, that if you’re doing it for yourself, it’s your time and your talent that would go into creating your blog. If you’re paying someone else to do it, you need to consider, “Can they do it in my brand likeness or essence well enough?”
Anyway, do I really need a blog? The short answer is, it would be ideal if you did have a blog. The reason I say that is because there are situations where given your day-to-day business operations, it could be difficult to keep up with a blog in a meaningful manner. If that’s the case, there may be other things you can do and spend your time or money on that would be more beneficial.
Also, can you do a good job at managing a blog? That is not just a matter of time, but can you write in a fashion that would be aligned with your customers?
Now, people who are running small businesses, oftentimes, have very intimate relationships with their customers. That means that they can speak their language and that they do understand their audience. Therefore, they can speak directly to what it is that their customers are looking to learn from them or understand from them.
Where I draw the line on some of these things is, A, if it’s going to take away from you being able to actually conduct business, then I would say no. B, if there are other ways that you can acquire new business that are either less expensive, less time consuming or what have you, I would also recommend that you could do those things instead of a blog.
Here’s the thing about a blog, a blog has a lot of prongs to it. When I say that, what I’m talking about specifically is that you do one blog post, and it can do an awful lot of work for you. If you put a blog post out that addresses one of the more common questions or one of the more common concerns a potential customer may have, that blog post, not only answers that question for your most common customer, it answers it for anybody who’s got that same question. There’s a high likelihood that your company and your blog post could be found when somebody is searching in your area for that same information.
A blog post gives you more content on your website, which boosts Google rankings. It also splits out your information in a manner that the more specific the content of your blog is per topic, for example, if you have a dog grooming website and you did a blog post on one specific service. In fact, you could break that even down further. A dog grooming service that you do that maybe there’s a specific type of dog that’s a particular challenge. If you did that, or you knew that there was a lot of a certain type of dog in your area, you could kill it with a single blog post or two. You can do one generally on that particular service. Then you could do another blog post on that service specific to that dog. Those things will rank really well in Google when somebody is looking for something that specific.
Yes, you should be doing a blog if you can, and if there aren’t better ways for you to acquire new business or to inform your customers.
Let’s talk a little bit about your blog post. You can check out an episode that we have, it’s just 10 minutes long. It’s on SEO. It describes how you can set up a page so that you get better rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. If you follow that 10 minutes’ worth of information, you’ll just do better and every blog post you have will actually serve some purpose in being found when people are looking for your product or service.
Now, the other thing that you can do that is spectacular, it also generates content, also gets SEO, is there are all kinds of different ways that you can do a blog. You can write one, meaning you can type one up and add it to your website as a new post or new page or you can do things like what I’m doing right now. You can do a podcast if there’s not a ton of visual to what you need to do or you can do a quick video on what this service is like or what your product is like.
If you do a video, imagine that you can have great compelling content on your website in the form of a video that is SEO relevant, it is relevant to what your customers want. An extra boost in SEO is compelling content. The search engines deem video as compelling content. If you just have video on a topic, you’re going to get bonus points from the search engines. People will be able to find that content a little bit easier.
There’s a great story in a podcast that I have with Robert Rose, who’s a content marketing expert. He talks about a construction worker who does remodeling and things of that nature. He always has to report back to his clients at the end of the day. He just started doing videos. He just started walking around the house saying, “I did this, I did this,” and showing them the work, show them how he did the work if that was necessary. In just a few minutes, he was done doing this thing that he didn’t like doing before, which was writing up an email to tell them all the work that he’d done. I think the same could be true for a lot of businesses.
Some of this is going to boil down to your level of creativity, your level of comfort, and doing it the way that would best suit whatever it is you’re trying to sell: your content, your product, your service. One way or the other, I would try to figure out how to do a blog. Again, not in a manner that then negatively impacts your business, but if you can put the content out there and figure out a way to do it, I would say that a blog’s benefit far outweighs the pain in the butt that it is to maintain one and to keep adding content to it.
If you have any other questions, Stacy in Naperville, feel free to further explain, go to the website, you can email me directly at [email protected]. You can go to the website and fill out forms. Thank you again for your question.
