“No matter what you do, your job is to tell your story.”

– Gary Vaynerchuck

Full Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you see “(Affiliate Link)” anywhere in this post, this means that if you choose to purchase from these links, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. I have chosen to become an affiliate for these products/services because I use them and recommend them myself. If you choose to purchase this product, you are not required to purchase through my link, but it is always very much appreciated!

People take multi-vitamins for a multitude of different reasons. Maybe dietary restrictions don’t allow for someone to get the nutrients from a common food source. Maybe they found out they are deficient in various nutrients that the body needs to survive. Whatever the reason, multi-vitamins are a one-stop shop for people trying to get all the necessary nutrients without looking at various other sources.

Think about that for a second. What if you were not getting all the nutrients you needed, and you had to take a separate, individual pill for each vitamin you were missing out on. That is not a very efficient way to get your nutrients. At some point, you’re probably not going to care about getting all your daily vitamins because it’s just too big of a hassle.

Now imagine someone comes along with ONE pill that contains ALL the nutrients and vitamins that you haven’t been getting. A multi-vitamin, where you can get all the nutrients you need from a single source.

Now let’s translate that to your website or business.

What is your website about?
Don’t have a website yet? Check out Why Every Small Business Needs a Website before you go any further.

Why should people come to your site?

Hopefully, your website is a great source of information, knowledge, or tools that can provide value to the people visiting. Starting a blog is a great way for people to get all the “nutrients” they need about a given topic. If I visit one website about content marketing, for example, and I can get all the information I need from that one site, I’m probably going to keep coming back to that site rather than jumping between various sites every day to get the same information.

If you’re not quite sold and you’re thinking “Is Blogging Dead?”, I have outlined 10 Reasons Why your Business Should Start a Blog. Like a multi-vitamin, the benefits of having a blog are tremendous.

THE 10 REASONS YOUR BUSINESS SHOULD START A BLOG

There certainly are more than 10 reasons that you should start a blog for your business, so I picked out the 10 that I feel are most important.

1. MOST WEBSITE VISITORS ARE STARTING TO EXPECT BLOGS

Since WordPress launched in 2003, blogs have grown increasingly popular. Kids, parents, grandparents, you name it; they are all getting into the world of blogging. Services like WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace are making it easier and easier for anyone (with or without experience in technology) to set up a website and start sharing their thoughts, ideas, and products. The real question is which platform to use. I prefer (self-hosted) WordPress.org. Of course, you will need to get your own domain and hosting from someone like Godaddy or Bluehost (Affiliate Link), but I think the few extra steps are worth it, in cost and freedom. A lot of people looking to get started online tend to go with the “Free” version, WordPress.com and end up regretting it. If you’re trying to get started with WordPress, I recommend taking a look at the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org before diving in.

This low-level entry barrier, brings different expectations for online experiences. Businesses are starting to create blog posts and articles, to give their readers as much helpful information as they can within their respective industries. Now, it is becoming harder to find businesses that don’t have some level of content, blog, or articles page. Every business professional wants to be the expert, or the “multi-vitamin,” of their industry or niche. If a potential customer comes to your site looking for information and you don’t have that information readily available, you may just lose that customer to a competing business.

2. A BLOG HELPS ESTABLISH TRUST WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS

I don’t know about you, but before I make a big purchase or commitment, I do a ton of research. If I’m going to be buying an expensive product, I’ll look up reviews, I’ll research the company, I’ll see what others have to say about the company, their customer service, ect. Why should I trust this company enough to give them my hard-earned money?

Starting a business blog, can be a good way to generate trust with your potential customer. If your small business blogs about useful information in the industry and is able to provide high quality content, visitors are going to see your brand as more trustworthy.

A prime example of this is Neil Patel’s website, NeilPatel.com. Neil posts a lot of really great content in regards to SEO and content marketing. He provides social proof of his findings and creates actionable content. After reading the information and seeing the results on his blog, I trust the information he is writing about, and more importantly, I trust his brand. If Neil Patel writes an article telling me that I need Product A, or that Product B will really help my business grow, I’m more likely to trust what he’s selling.

3. A BUSINESS BLOG CAN GIVE YOUR COMPANY A VOICE

To go along with building trust with your potential customers, your business, better yet your brand, needs a voice.

Who are you?

I don’t mean what kind of business you have. I mean, WHO ARE YOU?

• An Entrepreneur?
• Business Owner?
• Hustler?
• The guy someone calls when they don’t know the next step to take?

One of the main reasons that I buy a product that I WANT vs a product that I NEED is based on how well I can relate to the person or company who’s selling to me. A blog can give your business a voice, something your potential customers can relate to. A blog for your small business allows you to connect with the readers on a level that a simple product landing page cannot.

4. HAVING A BUSINESS BLOG CAN VALIDATE YOUR BRAND

How often do you blindly purchase a product or service from a company that you know nothing about?

Think about the last three phones you’ve purchased. Were they all the same brand? Why is that? Because the company has built up trust (Reason #2), and the brand has been validated in your mind.

The behemoth tech company, Apple, historically ships hundreds of millions of phones each year. It really wouldn’t be hard to believe that many of these buyers are repeat customers. That is because Apple has become a brand that many people can get behind and trust.

Here are three interesting statistics I found, on VisionCritical.com regarding brand loyalty:

1. Customer engagement leads to customer retention. Research by Rosetta Consulting, for example, found that engaged customers are five times more likely to buy only from the same brand in the future.
2. Highly-engaged customers buy 90 percent more often and spend 60 percent more per transaction, according to the Rosetta Consulting study.
3. A strong emotional connection with a brand is a stronger driver of loyalty than factors like ‘ease’ and ‘effectiveness’, according to an annual benchmark published by the advisory firm Forrester Research. You can find the whole list on their blog post.

By having a business blog, you are able to start the conversation around your business. Visitors to your site are able to engage with your blog posts through comments, and even give you insight into what your business is doing right and what you can be improving on. This also gives your customers the chance to speak highly to your product and brand, similar to a customer review.

5. A BLOG IS A GREAT WAY TO KEEP YOUR CUSTOMERS UPDATED ON YOUR BUSINESS

A blog can be a great way to promote your new products, features, and services to start building a buzz around what you are doing. This can be especially helpful if you haven’t built much of an email list yet. Without a list of people to email about your new product, it can be hard to spread the word. With a blog, however, you are able to get the word out and reach people you normally wouldn’t be able to (See Reason #8).

6. GREAT WAY TO BUILD AN EMAIL LIST

Email lists continue to be an extremely important part of growing and maintaining a business. Email lists give you an opportunity to connect with the people you know are interested in your company and/or products. In fact, one of the biggest regrets that I hear from entrepreneurs and online business owners is that they didn’t start building an email list from the very beginning. Pat Flynn, someone I look up to and strive to be like in the world of online business, talks extensively about his regrets of not starting his email list early on.

So what does a blog have to do with growing your email list?

You may have an email list already started with people wanting to follow what you are doing or hear when new products/features are available, and that’s great. By having a blog for your business, you have the ability to promote and prove why your business or product is worth their money.

Let’s say you own an SEO service company. You could start a blog that gives tips for readers, with actionable advice, to implement in their own businesses. As a reader, I may not be ready to buy, but I love the tips you are giving me, and that alone makes me want to subscribe to your mailing list. I want to know when you post the next great piece of content that I can use to implement in my business. Now, you have a way to reach me, to give me “Insider Tips,” or tell me about new products or services that will help me with SEO and ultimately improve my business.

As you start building my trust (Reason #2), I might just decide that your service is actually what I need to take my business to the next level. Without that blog, I may have never returned back to your site or signed up for your email list in the first place.

If you’re wanting to learn more about growing your email list, I suggest taking a look at Pat Flynn’s Free 72-Hour Email Challenge. I haven’t gone through this course yet myself, but I definitely will try it out in the near future. If the email challenge isn’t really quite your style, Pat’s got a lot of other great content and tutorials, like this one.

7. A BLOG MAKES YOUR BUSINESS SHAREABLE

Social media is incredible for expanding your business’ reach. According to statistics I found on SproutSocial, there are 400 new Facebook users and 54,000 share links EVERY MINUTE on Facebook (Maddy Osman – 28 Powerful Facebook Stats Your Brand Can’t Ignore in 2018).

How are you going to get people to share what you have on social media if you have nothing to share? Yes, you could have people find your products and drop a link to your product page on their Facebook, but I seldom see this from the users I interact with on Facebook. If you start a blog, you are able to provide links within that blog for people to share your post directly to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, ect. If you go back to the top of this page (or see image below), you’ll see links allowing you to easily share this post to many different social media sites.

8. CAN HELP DRIVE ORGANIC TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE/BUSINESS

If you have an online business, driving traffic to your website is massively important. This can be a really hard task if you are just sharing your products online within your social media circles, especially just starting out. By starting a blog, you are able to make your business and brand more searchable on Google. This is by no means an instant traffic generator, but will serve you well in the long run. Once that traffic does start to rise, you can even earn a little passive income blogging.

If you’re looking to increase you chance of ranking higher on Google, doing a little bit of keyword research ahead of time can be a huge help. You can find keywords related to your topic or business that generate significant traffic with little-to-no competition. By doing this, you can slowly increasing your chances of ranking on the first page in Google and potentially getting seen by people organically from the keywords you are using.

There are many tools out there (Ahrefs is by far my favorite tool) for doing all kinds of keyword research, back-link building, and tracking SEO metrics.

I should tell you that this is a paid tool, and pretty pricey at that, but it has loads of features and tools that can benefit your business. I will be doing a post about how I use Ahrefs in the future.

If Free is more your style, Google’s Keyword Planner can give you a good idea of which words are harder and easier to rank for.

9. HAVING A BLOG CAN HELP GENERATE INBOUND LINKS TO YOUR WEBSITE/BUSINESS

By starting a blog, you increase the chance of other websites linking back to your content and website. If you are constantly putting out great content and continue working on your relationships with influencers in your niche, a blog provides a great way for others to share what you have to say. Having other blogs and websites link back to you is also a great way to increase your SEO and gain traffic to your site organically.

If you don’t have a blog, it can be harder to get other websites to link back to you. Someone who has never used your product or heard of your business before will have a hard time linking to your product. On the flip side, if you have awesome actionable content, writers are more likely to link to the content you have. This brings more people to your site, and one step closer to closing the sale.

10. A BLOG CAN GET YOU NOTICED BY GOOGLE

Everyone knows that Google is important to the success of any online venture. If you start a blog, you are giving Google more reasons to show your content to people online. Google looks for content relevant to what is being searched and tries to give the best content available. It is also widely known that Google is constantly changing up their algorithms, which makes it harder for someone like you or me to just throw up any old site and get it in front of millions of people.

By having a great blog for your business, and utilizing tools like Ahrefs (or Google Keyword Planner), you can better leverage your content to be something Google sees as relevant and useful for the ones searching online.

Again, like the last two points made in this post (Reason #8 and #9), generating organic search traffic is not an instant success. It may take months, even years in some instances, to start generating substantial organic traffic, but constantly updating your blog with really good content, puts you in a better position in the long run.

WHAT IF YOU’RE NOT A WRITER?

A blog can be quite a time commitment, but there are rather cheap alternatives if writing the blog yourself isn’t something you’re up for.

I think it is always a good idea to write the content yourself, if you can, but I know not everyone is a writer. I’m not saying my writing is the best, but before I started this blog I absolutely hated writing. Now, I’m starting to really like it (imagine that!). If you don’t have the time, or writing just isn’t your thing, you can use websites like Fiverr (affiliate link) or UpWork to hire writers looking for blogging jobs. People on these sites typically work on a per hour or per post basis.

Keep in mind, if you are writing a blog for your own business, product, or service, you know your business better than anyone else. I’ve used Fiverr (aff) for articles and posts with another business I’m currently working on, and you get what you pay for. You can find a lot of really good writers on those sites (and plenty of other sites), but only you know your business inside and out.

TO SUMMARIZE: WHY YOUR BUSINESS SHOULD START A BLOG

Whether you are just starting out, or you have a well established business, there are too many benefits to starting a blog than to not have one at all.

1. MOST WEBSITE VISITORS ARE STARTING TO EXPECT BLOGS
2. A BLOG HELPS ESTABLISH TRUST WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS
3. A BUSINESS BLOG CAN GIVE YOUR COMPANY A VOICE
4. HAVING A BUSINESS BLOG CAN VALIDATE YOUR BRAND
5. A BLOG IS A GREAT WAY TO KEEP YOUR CUSTOMERS UPDATED ON YOUR BUSINESS
6. GREAT WAY TO BUILD AN EMAIL LIST
7. A BLOG MAKES YOUR BUSINESS SHAREABLE
8. CAN HELP DRIVE ORGANIC TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE/BUSINESS
9. HAVING A BLOG CAN HELP GENERATE INBOUND LINKS TO YOUR WEBSITE/BUSINESS
10. A BLOG CAN GET YOU NOTICED BY GOOGLE

If you know you need to get a blog on your site, but don’t know where to start, don’t go picking up a Blogging for Dummies book expecting your life and business to improve. Instead, check out other bloggers. See what they are doing.

I’m going to continue “documenting” my experiences with my blog, here on Nine-Five To Freedom. If you want to follow other established bloggers, check out the two I mentioned earlier in the post, Neil Patel and Pat Flynn. They’ve pointed me in the right direction and I have learned a lot from their posts and podcasts.

As always, if you liked the content in this post, it would be greatly appreciated if you subscribe to my email list with the button below. I will keep trying to put out posts like this as well as tutorials and tips to take your business to the next level.

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QUESTION OF THE DAY

Do you currently have a blog on your website?

How has your blog helped your business grow?

Nick

Website | + posts

I am an entrepreneur and adventure enthusiast, looking to break free from the Nine-Five grind. I'll show you what has worked and is currently working for me, as well as what hasn't worked so well.

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