Why you should write a blog
I’m quite new to this whole blogging thing, but it hasn’t taken me long to learn the real reasons why blogging is so important as a business owner. I’d like to share some of those reasons with you now.
Connecting with your Customers
The starting point of course is promoting yourself and the services you offer. Blogs are also a great way to engage with your current and future client base. They are much more personal then social media posts. They are down-to-earth and there to keep your customers informed, they should also give your readers an insight into your business culture and expertise.
Search Engine Optimisation
Another primary motivation to write blogs is for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), attracting all those Google spiders to your website. The spiders aren’t real spiders of course, just automatic algorithms that crawl, scan and rank your website. They determine whether your site is valuable or useless. If they find new and relevant content they push you up the search engine results. So, when potential new customers search for key words via Google (for example Virtual Assistant, Maidstone) there are much more likely to see your business name pop up on page 1 of the results. No one looks at page 2 anymore!
Release your Creativity
Blogging is also a great way to express yourself and be creative. It’s not for everyone, but if like me you have a creative background and are an experienced communicator, then you will find it cathartic. You are creating stuff. It’s out there, online for the whole world to see.
It’s not that difficult
It really doesn’t take that long to write a blog, with the ideal 500 words. Ok, you might spend a bit of time tweaking , cutting and pasting, but because you are writing about your business and your passion, the words should pretty much write themselves.
To support you, there are SEO plugin tools like Yoast that you can add to your website. It checks your content for various key readability factors with a simple traffic light rating.
Microsoft Word also has a handy little feature you can turn on, which gives you readability statistics. To turn on: Click File, and then click Options, Click Proofing and under ‘When correcting spelling and grammar in word’ check the Readability Statistics box.
Now every time you review your spelling, your pop up box will show detailed analysis – such as the reading ease score, reading level by age and % of passive sentences. The rule of thumb is that the closer you are to 0% the better. Research shows readers just love this, accompanied by short snappy sentences and small paragraphs. We have busy lives and just don’t have the time to digest complex stuff on the go.
Need some help?
If you would like some help to start writing your own blogs, get in touch. I’d be happy to support you to get them off the ground. I’m confident you will soon start to see the benefits of blogs, with the goal to be ranked on page 1 of Google, as I am.