How an active blog can help your business

Every business needs a blog. Even One Dog Solutions. Especially One Dog Solutions. You should practice what you preach, right? Blogging for your business is a crucial part of any organization’s marketing strategy. So why doesn’t every businesses do it? Or if they do, why not on a regular basis?

Keeping up a blog is work.

There. I said it. You didn’t get into business to write blogs. Well, maybe some of us did, but it still takes time and effort. On average, I spend 2 to 6 hours researching topics, editing images, and writing the actual copy for a blog post. The recommended blog posting frequency is at least once a week. You could be spending that time actually doing what you set out to do, i.e. your job, right? Not all of us are natural born writers, so content marketing in the form of a blog actually becomes work. And maybe work that we dread, don’t look forward to . . . and then never really do. I’m trying to break that chain, and do what I tell my clients to do (or do it for them) and write some content to share how easy it actually can be!

WordPress has a built in blogging function.

Chances are, if you’re worked with One Dog Solutions we used WordPress for your website build. It currently powers around 34% of websites on the internet. WordPress was originally built as a CMS (Content Management System) for bloggers. It’s built in blogging features make it easy to organize your posts. Users can search by category, author or keyword tags to help them find what they’re looking for in your large amount of content. Even if you’re website isn’t built with WordPress, most of the popular CMS’s out there have incorporated a blog feature.

Ok, so you a have blog. What blog topics should you write about?

This question is more easily answered than you think. What questions do your customers ask you most often? They might be questions about your business, what it does, or more specific details about a service. Let’s use One Dog Solutions as example of what you might want to write about in your blog. One Dog Solutions is primarily a web design agency, and has four main service offerings:

• Website Design
• Digital Marketing
• Graphic Design & Printing
• Website Support

Our blog will focus on the following categories to expand on the information about our services: Content Creation, SEO, Graphic Design, General Marketing, and Web Design. Most of the questions I field at One Dog Solutions are related to our services and often unique to the person asking, but we receive many of the same questions often. We’ll be answering some of the more frequent questions in our blog as how-to articles, tips and tricks to use in your marketing, and so on. We want to share information about how our customers, and potential customers looking for us in the search bar, can be more successful online. Your topics should be reflective of your business, and provide information from you as an authority in your field.

The benefits of blogging for your business.

So now that you know how easy it is to start a blog, we’ll talk about our title statement: How an active blog can help your business. You’ve just spent over six hours on your first post. There has to be some benefit, or why do it?

A blog helps establish you as the authority.

You didn’t just roll out of bed yesterday and start your business. You’ve already got experience and expertise in what you do, but how do your potential clients know this? You’ve got a fancy new website, and your service pages detail what you can do and are well written, but they don’t always tell the whole story. When you receive an e-mail with a customer question on a topic that you’ve already written an informational blog post about, you can forward a link to your post instead of penning the response again. It’s a personal response written from you about the subject. Answering your customers’ common questions in a blog develops trust, and shows you potential customers that you have valuable information and expertise.

An active blog with quality content drives traffic to your website.

You’ve probably heard the expression, “Content is King!” if you’ve looked at ways to get more traffic to your website. It’s absolutely true that publishing more content will increase traffic to your website. Shortly after you publish that blog post you painstakingly spent time on, Google and the other search engines will index it and crawl it for content to show to their searchers. Writing quality content that is relevant to your business will help bring potential customers to your site.

In this blog post, we’ve talked about content marketing and used our business as an example of topic ideas. We’ve also used our core services as to how we chose our categories and blog topics. Search engines look for keywords and phrases to match up with what someone is searching for. Quality optimized content is one of the first steps after a website launch to help with SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. The more content and keywords you have on a subject, the higher potential you have to rank on the first page of a search. Ask yourself, when was the last time you went past the first page of a search? Even past the top five suggestions?

Writing content for your blog is a long term strategy.

I opened this blog post with a not so nice note, and I close with one. Except the downside to this part is that it’s only temporary. SEO and gaining traffic through good content, including blogs, takes time. When users start finding your content in a search, and begin to click through to your blog, AND spend time engaging with your content, that sends a signal to the search engine. It signals that your content should be shown more often, and often times in front of competing content! This process can take weeks or months. Bear with it. Write more content. Improve on what you’ve already written. If you build it, they will come.