To blog or not to blog – is it a necessity in today’s digital world?

Business

Wondering whether to write a blog for your small business? Find out why it’s a marketing necessity, and six tips to get it right.

In today’s digital world we are bombarded with messages on a daily basis, all sent to us from different directions – from social media and advertising, to radio and magazine ads.

As a small business entrepreneur how do you achieve cut through and how do you position yourself as an authority in your field?   

With limited time on your hands, let’s face it, you would rather be doing what you love vs working in your business – should you invest time to write a blog?  

Writing a blog is a great way to keep your audience interested, engaged and informed on what is happening within your business and how you can help your target audience, one well written piece could achieve multiple objectives.

Not only will it keep your website fresh and current, but also create content for your email and social media channels.

How many blogs are there?

This is a tricky one to quantify as the digital space is moving so quickly. Checking out a few sources there seems to be a general consensus that about two million blogs are posted each day – that is a huge amount of content to wade through. 

What is a blog?

A blog is an article you publish on your website, there to help demonstrate your industry knowledge and expertise – offering your take on the world 

Some businesses also use this tool to publish their diary of events, share client case studies or use it as an opportunity to share their industry views and expertise. Think of it as your own personal newspaper.

How can a blog help you drive business?

There are two key reasons we might invest time into writing a blog. 

The first is that outside of your standard website content, it enables you to share additional insight about your industry or business. If you are a florist for example you could talk about what trends are coming, flower of the month – what they might mean and share hints and tips, such as how to arrange flowers perfectly in a vase.

The second reason is that it will help to boost your SEO (Site Engine Optimisation). This is talked about often, how it works is that by blogging regularly (regularly will vary by business, eg: monthly, fortnightly or weekly), it shows the search engines that the website is being used, interacted with and updated regularly, which in turn supports your ranking.

Six tips for a successful blog

Hopefully we have demonstrated the worth in focusing on writing a blog, we wanted to share our top tips to help get you started.

1) Be clear about what you wish to achieve

As with all marketing a good place to start is to think about what you  want the activity to achieve. Do you wish to drive sales?  Demonstrate knowledge? Or explain a new product or service? Depending upon your focus will result in how you craft the blog.

2) Build a plan

Once you know what you wish to achieve with your business and the direction you wish to head in, you need to build a marketing plan to help take you there and achieve your objectives.

3) Share useful and interesting content

As with all marketing knowing your target audience is at the core, writing a blog is no different. Make sure that the blog topic you wish to focus on makes sense, compliments your overall marketing plan and that you are sharing something interesting or relevant for your audience.

4) Ensure your work is grammatically correct

This is key. Make it easy for the reader to absorb. It has to make sense and write it for a person to consume.

5) Commit to writing regularly

Decide how regularly you should blog it is always a good idea to think about what you could reasonably achieve when you are at your busiest. Little and often is better than a big influx of marketing activity when you need to drive business.

6) Don’t share too much

Think about your reader on this one. Yes you wish to share something you are passionate about, but consider “Will the reader share equal passion for this topic as I do?”  

Make your copy easy to read, jargon free and visual – think about if someone is skim reading your work, what key messages do you wish them to take away?

A blog will help support your marketing strategy

Writing a blog will definitely help support your marketing activity by demonstrating to your clients and potential client’s your knowledge or expertise of your industry, as well as supporting your website SEO.

Your blog is also great content to be sharing in your social media and email marketing channels. So the question I think is not “Should you blog?” but “Why would you not in today’s digital world?”

Read more blogging tips

Need more tips to help you write a brilliant business blog? Here are some resources that will help you:

Sophie Comas is the Founder and Freelance Marketing Consultant at Rimu Marketing. She is committed to helping small businesses to connect with their ideal client by using all tools across the marketing mix.

Photo by Nick Morrison