3 Reasons Blogs are Still Relevant for Small Business Marketing

The other day a client asked me, “Do I really need a blog?” You see she had spoken to another marketing professional, a term I should use in quotation marks given their clear lack of knowledge about long-term marketing tactics, and that person said a blog wasn’t really relevant anymore.

Y’all, I about fell out of my chair. I did a little digging into said professional’s website & social media accounts to discover that they shared quite a lot of articles on their Facebook page. Guess what? Those articles are BLOGS written by another company.

So Lesson 1: Before you take anyone’s recommendation on what you should be doing, see what they are doing on that subject in their own business and then ask more questions.

Moving on, the answer to “Do I need a blog?” is an emphatic YES*! And for multiple reasons I will outline in a minute.

To start though, I will explain that asterisk on the “YES”. It’s there because a blog is relevant and beneficial only if you are:

1. 1. 1. Wanting to increase your search ranking
      2. Can write well about the topics for which you want to be considered an expert
      3. Share those topics with others when they are published

If you are only looking for your website to be a digital business card or online portfolio for your business, then you do not need to spend your time creating articles for a blog.

If you want your website to work for you when you are doing other things and bring in organic traffic, then you need content for search engines to index and that goes beyond the basic service pages of your website.

Why Blog Seems Like an Outdated Term

Though we may not hear it talked about as much these days, blogging is still quite popular and very necessary to your overall marketing strategy. In the fashion & lifestyle world, blogging is still a term used regularly. In the rest of the business world, this is just now referred to as “content marketing.”

And guess what? The content that is actually being used in the “content marketing” being talked about is…you got it, blog posts!

My Top 3 Reasons Your Business Needs a Blog

1. Create now. Reap the benefits for years.

The beauty, and curse, of the internet is that content can live forever. That’s super positive for a blog. The content you create now can live on your website for-ev-er, or at least until you decide to take it down.

That means once you do the work, it is sitting there on your site being indexed by search engines with the potential to bring traffic to your website for months or years to come.

So while you are doing other things in your business, working with clients, or posting on social media, the blog is bringing new potential customers to your website.

Example:

There is a blog post that I originally wrote about six years ago that still brings traffic to this site every. single. month. Not just that, it brings such a large amount of traffic that I have since updated that article three times to be more relevant as the topic evolves and have links to newer content to keep people moving through the website once they have arrived.

Doesn’t it sound appealing to have something you created years ago still bringing traffic to your website with you doing absolutely nothing in regard to continually promoting it?

Yep! I thought so.

2. Easiest way of entry to your business.

Piggybacking off that last point above, a blog post is the easiest entryway for someone to get to your website. Once they are there, you can have links to your services pages or individual product pages so the blog brings them in and drives traffic to the ways to buy from you.

It may not have been that visitor’s initial goal, but after reading the creative genius of your expertise on a blog article, they got curious. You have provided information that benefits the user without being pushy in a “buy from me, buy from me” way that, let’s face it, turns all of us off. Yet still you’re providing a way for them to learn about your services should they want to go further.

Using features like a categories, tags, and a Related Posts widget, which populates more articles at the bottom of each based on the categories & tags, you are building an intricate spider web of your website. This will help it rank higher in search and provide users with clear next steps they can take once they’ve consumed the content that brought them in.

3. Serves as your source for all social media & email marketing content.

Your blog is the first piece of content to create from which you can pull photos, videos, graphics, and captions from for your social media content. Bonus: your captions can also drive them to view more on the topic by reading the full blog post!

This is how content marketing becomes more efficient.

1. 1. 1. Write a blog post.
      2. Pull the first paragraph or two into an email to go to your subscribers and drive traffic to that article.
      3. Grab those same paragraphs and turn them into captions for social media posts with a graphic from the article.
      4. Follow that up with more posts later using the subheads and/or other paragraphs from the blog paired with a different photo/graphic.

You don’t have to create fresh brand new contact for email and for social media with this approach.

All that needs to be created is the blog and then pull various pieces from that to utilize in different ways. Boom! You’ve literally just cut the workload in half and still produced the content that will work for you long after the Instagram post has fallen out of the top 9 grid.

By creating regular blog content, (i.e. weekly or biweekly) you can avoid the, “I don’t know what to post on social media!!” panic attacks. You can simply go back to any of your past blog posts, pull a different graphic, a paragraph you haven’t shared before and you’ve got a social media post!