Why bother with blogging?

Is blogging on your to-do list?

Here's how you can make it a great business tool.

A photo of Rachel ExtanceRachel Extance is an award-winning journalist and blogger. She helps B2B coaches and consultants talk about who they are, what they do, and why their clients need it.

This is her Ask the Expert session for our members.

 

Do you have a lost and lonely website?

You've built it (or had it built). But you're not sending anyone to it.

Think back... Why did you build your website in the first place?
● To show you're a real business?
● To tell people what you do?
● To tell people more about yourself and your experience?
● To sell your products or services?
I hope so.

So now you've got a website, how often do you send people to it?
Would you like people to be visiting it every day?
Would you like those people to be interested in what you do?
Would you like to be able to show people visiting your website other things they are interested in?
Would you like them to be able to join your email list so you can keep in touch with them?

If so, you want to be blogging.
And you want to publish those articles on your website first.

Why publish on your website first?

  • Because your website is your store front, even if you sell services. You want to bring people to your door so they can see what you have on sale. (If you don't have what you're selling on your website yet, come and talk to me about sales pages.)
  • Because you own your website. It's not going to close down tomorrow or change the rules on how it works.
  • Because blogging is trackable. You can see what people clicked on to come to your website. You can see what they clicked on next. You can track backwards so you can see what they clicked on before they took an action you wanted them to take, like joining your email list or buying from you. If they came from a search engine, you can see what they searched for that led to your website. The more blog posts you have, the more search terms you can rank for, the more people will come to your website.

Ready made material for social media posts

Your blog gives you all the material you need for social media, newsletters and emails. Write your article, publish on your own blog and then carve it up into posts.
If you have 6 articles on your website and you create 5 posts from each, you have 30 days of social media posts. If they are evergreen posts you can put them out in rotation for many months or even years.

What the articles do

● Answer your clients questions
● Enable people to get to know you
● Show your expertise
● Act as a salesperson for you
● Give you space to work out what you think about a topic

Why bother with blogging?

Because more people will know about you, what you do, why you do it, and how they can buy it.

Here are some questions members of Drive The Network asked about blogging
Q. How do you get meaningful information about what people are looking at on your website?
A. If you set up Google Analytics 4, which is going to replace the current version on July 1, 2023, you can ask it to track what actions people take on your website.
There is a webinar from Mary Owusu showing you how to set up Google Analytics 4 . If you would like more help, then Amanda Webb has helpful resources including a course. *
A new development on SEO has just emerged. See: Important News for Google Search  

Q. Is there a minimum length for a blog post?
A. No. It needs to be as long as it takes to achieve your goal for it. If you have answered the question, or shared the knowledge you wanted to, then you don’t need to keep on writing for the sake of it. Search engines are not interested in fluff. They want to provide good answers for what is being searched for.

Q. How do you move away from the blank page?
A. AI tools can be very helpful for this. They give you a starting point. Another, more sociable, approach is to ask a business friend to get on a call with you. You can say to them that you are launching a new service and could they ask you questions about it, or that you are refreshing your website copy. It’s a good way to find out what people value about you as well. It’s hard to read the label when you are sitting in the jar. Your friend will do that for you. An AI tool can’t because it doesn’t know you.

Q. What’s one thing you should be doing?
A. Write! Writing is a practice. The only way to get better at it, or feel more comfortable doing it, is to write. Write to one person, and use ‘you’ so they know you are talking to them. Have a clear focus for the article you are writing. Read it through and ask yourself if you stuck to the point. If you’ve gone off topic, cut and paste that material into a separate document so you’ve got it to create another article with.

Get in touch with Rachel:

Rachel Extance offers 1:1 services, both writing for people and helping them to write themselves, and also runs Rachel’s Writing Club. Get all the details at https://extance.co.uk/

by Ann Hawkins