No one really cares...
I know, it sounds brutal but really, out there in the big wide world, no one gives a stuff about you. The reason I say this is because it’s true, just think about it from your own point of view. Do you really care that a business you’ve never heard of has won a gong, or announced a new product, or hired a new Finance Director. Unless these things are directly relevant to you, they pass you by in the great clutter of the internet.
If you spend your marketing money telling people how brilliant you are or how proud you are to be sponsoring a football match or just crowing about a recent sale, then is it any wonder it is part of the 99% of the internet that no one sees?
The simple fact is that your customers don’t care about you, your products, your staff, your latest gong, or practically anything else you currently put out on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram etc., etc.
So how do you make people care about you?
You can’t. But you can give them something that they really want. If you can provide insight, facts, how to do something or any of a million things that affect their everyday business lives then you can attract people to your website and potentially derive a number of key benefits.
Before we go onto the benefits of blogging let’s pause to think about what blogging isn’t. We’ve written about ‘GOPHERS’ many times before – these are the meat and drink of small business advertising. Gongs, Offers, Products, Hires, Events, Results and Self-congratulatory crap. The problem is that most people are either put off or simply avoid them. The only people who are interested are your own staff, your Nan and the odd customer and with all due respect to your Nan, they aren’t going to move your business forward.
If you want to get real benefit from your blog then cut these out and think about your customer problems and start writing blogs about that.
The benefits of business blogging
Business Benefits of Blogging
Cheaper SEO!
Because blogs sit on your website they are continually indexed by the search engines and they build up over time to help you get found by visitors.
Demonstrates Your Industry Leadership
It’s a brave step to start proper blogging. You’re setting yourself up, you’re putting your head above the parapet, with the full expectation people are going to take pot shots at you. Of course you could always switch off comments, but where’s the fun in that!
When you start blogging about your industry and you’re blogs are authoritative, knowledgeable and helpful then you start to build your credibility, and the beauty is that your blogs stay there forever and start building your credibility with the search engines as well.
Differentiator
If your competitors are writing about themselves but you are blogging about your industry, your customers’ problems, issues and solutions then you are immediately in a different league.
Drives Traffic
The ultimate aim of all this is to drive traffic to your website. Great content, customer focussed, works, the stats show us that. Once you get traffic to your site you then need to think about converting them with Calls To Action, which is another subject altogether.
Blogs Feed Your Social Media
Now that we have all these social media platforms to use, wouldn’t it be good if we could use it to help our potential customers. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Linkedin you need to have something worthy to put up there.
As we’ve said already, if all you’re doing is crowing about yourself then all the Social Media in the world is not going to help you drive traffic and convert visitors.
Let’s say you’re a lawyer and you’ve written a piece about upcoming changes to the divorce laws. Aside from the blog itself, you now have something you can link to from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc. Something that is actually of value to people – who may be looking for a divorce lawyer and who may just think you know what you’re talking about!
