Can Having A Blog Help Your Business?
Blogs have existed for years now and have become respectable news outlets, vehicles of change within organizations and communications tools for product announcements and updates. Blogging also provides an opportunity to humanize a company to its market. For us blogging is:
Sharing
Many people think that Social Media is all about the conversation and engaging in the conversation. We believe what makes any media “social” is the ability to share it and to help you to open up. Not only can you share the concepts by telling your peers and friends about a blog, but everybody shares in the insights as well. A blog makes you think more about how you can share your content, your thoughts and why others may want to work/connect to you. It has changed our culture and the way we communicate our business to others.
Critical Thinking
If everything else went away (the readers, the comments, the community, the feedback), blogging is an amazing place to think about an issue, a product launch, service process or news item and work through it.
Ideation
In using your blog as a platform for your critical thinking, you will quickly start uncovering new and interesting business models and ideas for how you can push your industry forward or how it can/should be thinking differently. Writing a blog, reading the comments and providing feedback is the ultimate petri dish for ideation and innovation.
Tinkering
The ideas and critical thinking are not always 100% final. Blogging allows you to tinker with ideas, to work at them. Over time you start realizing how wrong you were, how visionary you were and how much further you still have to go.
Business
Make no mistake about it. Our business blog started out as a way for us to tell the world how we think differently about marketing, advertising, social media and our industry. Over the years, this has attracted clients, speaking engagements, and other interesting business opportunities. So while it is not a place where we sell our wares, it is a place that is directly tied to our overall business objectives/strategy.
Relationships
It’s not about sitting in the dark recesses of your basement as you tinker away with words and thoughts. It’s about using this platform to connect. It’s about real interactions with real human beings. If you blog, step out into the physical world. Meet other bloggers. Meet your potential customers; share, learn and collaborate with them.
If you’re thinking, I’m not a blogger so how can blogging actually help me? Here are a few ways that blogging can affect your business:
- Makes your website more lively and friendly.
- Brings more web traffic to your website.
- Builds brand awareness, which gets your business known globally or wherever you are looking to be found.
- Lets you easily provide news, specials, etc.
- Establishes you as a subject-matter expert and thought leader.
- Gives you free publicity through search engine results.
- Helps build links to corporate websites which will help people find your business in online searches.
- Helps you reach out to clients and potential clients.
- Demystifies your business and makes it (and you) more approachable.
- Builds a following of readers or visitors, who might turn into clients one day.
- Helps you communicate in a timely fashion.
It may seem like a daunting task to establish and maintain a successful online presence for your business, especially when it comes to driving traffic, but the decision to launch and maintain a company blog can be one of the most rewarding choices you could make for your business online. If you’re thinking about adding a blog to your website, or how to stay on top of creating content, then get in touch and let’s talk about ways to make your blog benefit your business!
And we leave you with the below short video clip of Seth Godin (best selling author and entrepreneur) which struck us because of how powerful the sentiments are and how relevant they still are today. Although new and shinier objects like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are very important, nothing is more powerful than the written word. Blogging is and can be the hub that connects your business to the world.