When I speak with small business owners and marketers, one
of the persistent obstacles to creating a blog presence often are expressed as
two key points:
1) We
don’t have time to write regularly.
2) We
don’t have the ability to write regularly.
That seems like a non-starter, right? If you find this
is your situation, please think again, as you are missing a key opportunity –
since, as mentioned in an earlier business
blogging article, YOU are the expert in your field.
Think about what you do every day. And bare with the
drama but… you likely get into a multi-thousand-point vehicle powered with
explosive gasses, you head down the road with other similar vehicles, risking
life and limb to get to and from work, the store, home, and road trips.
Driving a car is a pretty risky thing with special attention and skills
required to avoid disaster. But we all do this regularly, and one reason
why is because we HAVE TO. Another reason is we get real advantages from being
able to transport ourselves here and there. In short, it is worth it and
necessary. The same thing can be said about creating a blog-based
presence for your business. In fact, to stretch a metaphor even
further – let’s think of your standard minivan as somewhat akin to your main
web site. So if your www.company.com
is a minivan, what of your blog? Ahh, truly it is a turbo-powered sports
car!
You need your regular web site to represent your business,
your products, who stands behind the business, investors, contact information
and the like. You don’t always change content on it super-quickly, you
just need it, above all, to be accurate, current, reliable, somewhat attractive
and optimized
for getting found online. Okay, so we might question whether a minivan
is attractive, but you get the idea! You need your primary web site to
take you places and live up to the expectations and needs of a broad
audience. But is that enough? In order to be
competitive, and get found online, a blog site can provide you with the more
nimble capability to present your products and related knowledge, maneuvering
in ways that your minivan web site can’t.
-
Drive traffic and
generate leads: blog sites are built with search optimization in
mind. You can use your knowledge (and hyperlinks!) to create a
high-octane traffic-driving machine. That’s one major way your blog is
supposed to function! Increasing conversions
is key to building your business, and your blog can play a crucial role of
increasing interested and qualified traffic. -
Engaging and Building Connections: blog
sites are created to be interactive. Each article is an opportunity to share
information, get feedback and engage in dialog with those customers, prospects and
industry experts who care about what you care about. -
Test Drive Ideas: A blog site can also be
an opportunity to share ideas about new or possible initiatives. This can
be invaluable interaction about future directions.
Here’s an experiment to
try: take the name of your own industry, for example, “draperies.”
Google it: “Draperies
and blogs.” Results: what your
competition is doing. So it could be that while you’ve been functioning
using the ol’ minivan, your competition has been zipping-by using their own
speedier on-line vehicles. Yikes!
Again the good news is that the
technology part can be quite easy. Low technology barriers
to entry for the blog sphere are a fact.
And we know your blog site can be well positioned to contribute to your
business growth. Given this, it seems that the old excuses will fix
themselves!
