Is Blogging for Your Business Worth It?

Recently, we were asked by one of our clients if we believe writing and pushing out industry-related blogs is worth it. For business owners who have enough to manage with company operations, maintaining a blog on your website might not come in at the top of your priority list. Yet, if so many other businesses are blogging, there has to be some worth to it…right?

So, is blogging worth it for business owners?

The short answer is yes .

BUT , there is a ‘but.’

Writing and pushing out blog posts on your website and other sources—like social media—is absolutely worth it, BUT only if you are committed to:

• Creating valuable, unique content that your readers would find helpful
  
• Posting regularly
  
• Sharing your posts through marketing efforts, like social media or an e-newsletter
  

Running a blog for your business can be a great marketing tool, but if you aren’t 100% committed to doing these three things, the few posts you write will be a waste of valuable time.

For about a year and a half now, our team has been testing this theory to see if blogging and pushing out articles through various methods really is a reliable marketing tactic. Since we, like many of our clients, are a small business, who better to test this out on than ourselves?

In August 2016, we brought a full-time content writer on board with us (that’s me!). One of my responsibilities was to keep up with our blog. For about a year and a half now, I’ve been creating weekly blog posts that relate to the digital marketing industry, pushing them out on social media and, most recently, starting a monthly e-newsletter than sends these articles out to our subscribers.

Over this period of time, I have found that yes, blogging is indeed a valuable form of marketing that can grow your audience and be a resource for clients. However, the three golden rules must be followed if you want to see growth.

The most important aspect of maintaining a blog is writing content that your audience finds helpful. After all, this is the purpose of blogging and getting people to continue reading your content. Start by identifying who your target audience is—and keep in mind that it might easily be a wider audience than your products or services are geared toward.

When coming up with topics for your blog posts, a great place to start is by thinking about what questions you frequently get asked by your customers. If you can provide answers and information about not only your own services, but also industry trends and topics, you’ll see that people beyond your customers find your blog posts helpful.

This post itself is a great example of that. We have been asked by several clients if maintaining a blog is worth their time, so we decided to write a blog post answering this question for those and other business owners.

Similarly, many of our most popular blog posts were written in response to questions we repeatedly got from clients, such as “ how do I decide on a marketing budget ?” and “ how do I get my clients to leave me reviews?”.

Another aspect of showing your audience that you’re a reliable source is proving you will provide quality content on a regular basis. Before you commit to blogging, consider how much time it takes to write a blog post and how much time you can dedicate to writing them. From there, you can create a blog post schedule. Whether you plan on posting once a week or once a month, make sure your posting goals are realistic.

When it came to creating our own publishing schedule, our team decided to publish one high-quality blog post per week. This allows us to continue working on projects for our clients while still giving our readers content. For small businesses that are just starting to grow their following, we recommend posting once per week.

If you’re set on blogging but don’t have the time to do it yourself—or if writing isn’t your strong suit—consider hiring a content writer to do the work for you.

What good is all the hard work you’re putting into writing blog posts if you aren’t sharing them? If you want people to find your content and share it themselves, start by sharing it through your own channels. It’ll put your blogs in front of a wider audience and help you gain more of a following.

The platforms you share on will depend on where your audience is and what mediums you’ve determined work the best. We found Facebook and LinkedIn are two social media sites that our audience was using most, so we share our blog posts on both platforms. Additionally, we send out a monthly e-newsletter that shares recent posts with our subscribers, creating one more outlet for spreading content.

Since we started writing blog posts and pushing them out on Facebook and LinkedIn, we’ve seen steady growth in our social media followers, likes and views.

Although this progress might seem slow, it’s still a substantial difference than the amount of interaction we had before we starting posting content regularly.

As long as you’re committed to creating valuable content, posting regularly and sharing your blogs, we think blogging is a great asset for your small business. We’ve seen positive results from our own blog, including expansion into an email newsletter and having our blogs published by other professional organizations.

Just make sure that if you’re going to start blogging, you do it right.