Should I Start a Blog?
Blogs have become a de rigeur staple of the content marketing world. Some could argue that blogs are passe, but in fact, blogs remain a necessary, dare I say even useful tool for reaching and snagging an audience.
That doesn’t mean you need a blog.
This is certainly a bold stance for aa content agencyto make; after all, blog posts are our bread and butter. And we are literally writing a blog post about it.
Before you build a blog, you need to understand the fundamental risks and benefits. Oh yes, a blog can be risky! (Okay not often, but still, oooh, the content world is dangerous and cool.)
What are the risks?
You will waste time and money on something that does not produce results
You won’t know what “results” actually are
To mitigate your risk, channel your inner “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and ask yourself these questions three:
What is your goal (quest)?
Who is your audience?
How will you measure success?
After we address those, we’ll look at how to create a blog that bolsters your content marketing efforts. And finally, we’ll share some alternatives to a blog if it doesn’t fit your business.
What is your goal?
This is time to navel gaze and determine what exactly you want. Do you want to create a loyal band of followers, build a repository of shareable knowledge, or maybe become more searchable online?
These are all good reasons to start a blog, but each will have significantly different strategies. Attracting a large following will require intense social media and promotion efforts. A repository of knowledge needs a lot of people to build it and keep it relevant. Becoming searchable online is very important, and it means you need to be or have someone who is savvy in search engine optimization, aka SEO.
These three blogs would require three different strategies, which is why knowing your goal is crucial. And let’s not forget that these three strategies are not mutually exclusive; for example, you’ll need good SEO to help attract those new followers.
So before you install Wordpress and start typing, think about what you want to do, because that will inform what you create and how you share it.
Who is your target audience?
Marketers loooove to talk about target audiences. Guilty as charged! There is a reason: If you build a taco stand for a hot dog cart audience, you’re going to have a lot of extra guacamole at the end of the day.
You need to know who your audience is so you have answers to questions like:
What does your audience want to read about?
What do you want your audience to do?
Where will your audience discover your articles?
Let’s take these one at a time.
What does your audience want to read about?
Many companies get caught up in the story they want to tell about their product, service, or company. I’m sorry if this is hard for you to hear, but most people do not care about your company or your story.
They don’t care about your office renovation, or that you ordered your team pizza today. Usually, they don’t care about your founding story or how you work your company values into certain things you do. If they do care, they’ll go to that section on your website.
A blog is not a place for you to write what you want to write (unless it’s a personal blog you’re just doing for fun). You should want to use your blog to engage people, and the way you do that is by solving a problem, teaching them something new, sating their curiosity, or entertaining them. Which will you do?
This is also where keyword research comes in extremely handy, because if you get a good keyword research tool like SEMRush, you can discover what people are looking for and the questions they have. That’s how you’ll always know what to write about — it’s how we determined we would write the very blog you are reading. Plot twist!
What do you want your audience to do?
Blogs should not be like the scantily clad models who stand next to shiny new cars. Blogs, like all else on your website, should move people to action. You should be asking them to sign up for your newsletter, download a checklist or ebook, convince them to book a demo, anything.
It’s not enough for someone to find you, say “Aha, you’ve answered my very specific question to my complete satisfaction!” and then leave never to return. Nightmare.
If you don’t have something you want your audience to do, you need to consider why you think you need a blog in the first place.
Where will your audience discover your articles?
You wrote a piece of content. It is live on the internet! Huzzah, your work is complete!
LOL obviously that’s a marketing joke. Heyo!
So you’ve finally built that hot dog stand, congrats on giving the people what they want! Now how will they find you? Sure, you might luck out that a few people will walk by wherever you are, but that’s not a strategy.
Part of knowing your audience is knowing where they go on the internet to hang out. Are they on Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Clubhouse, Twitter? Do you already have an active social channel, or do you need to start from scratch?
How will you measure success?
Measurement has always been a bit of a bumpy ride for content marketing strategy. Unless you have a big team or deep knowledge of measurement tools and a good tracking system or all three, it can be hard to pinpoint precisely what your content is doing for you. I can’t tell you how many companies we’ve seen waste their time and money on a blog that was doing nothing for them.
But this isn’t a problem with the blog; it’s a problem with everything else. Here are some low-investment ways to track how your blog is doing:
Aforementioned tools like SEMRush will track page performance. Hands-down our top recommended tool. Stumbling block: You need a basic understanding of how SEO works, but SEMRush is pretty easy to use without putting in a lot of training time
Google Analytics can show you how many people come to your site, where they come from, how they move through your site, how long they stay there, and more. Stumbling block: It’s a bit complicated to learn
Social media dashboards can show you engagement metrics on social posts you publish pointing to blog articles, and can give you a rudimentary idea of how well the topic resonates with the audience on that specific platform
WIth that overview, here are some really simple KPIs you can use to measure your content:
Page views
Google position change
What page(s) on your site do visitors go to after each page?
How long are they spending on the page? (If they bounce within a few seconds, it means your content is not what they were looking for)
Hopefully your blog has a CTA you can measure. How many people took that action?
OMG, Should I Start a Blog Already or What?!
Yes, you should probably start/continue/resurrect your blog. But I wanted to illustrate all the points above first to show you that a blog is more than a blog, it’s a lifestyle. A strategic, goal-oriented lifestyle.
Is there anyone who doesn’t need a blog? Here are a few specific instances:
You have a product marketed to people who do not use the internet. (Though in this case we would suggest a content initiative built around marketing to people who influence the buying decisions of that not online demographic)
You are selling straightforward, easily understandable products to the masses (think phone cases) and do not want to expand beyond merchandise. In this case, you want to ensure that you have robust, best-in-class copywriting, ongoing social media initiatives, and excellent online advertising (Edify can still help you with all that, by the by)
You married into the royal family and they made you shut off your blog
RIP, The Tig
These three bullet points still provide a lot of opportunity to reap the benefits of content even if it’s not on a blog. But we’re here to talk about blogs. If you don’t happen to fall into the three instances of Definitely-Don’t-Need-a-Blog, let’s talk about what you need to get started assuming you’ve already figured out your goals, target audience, and measurement.
A Robust List of Topics
This is why you want to know who your audience is and where they’re feeling pain: Because it will give you TONS to write about. Again, people visiting your blog don’t care about you, they care about you helping them.
So figure out where they need help, and then write about their problems. Why are they problems? How do they fix them? How do they avoid creating more problems? Why do you solve their problems? Why are they on your site in the first place?
At Least One Good Writer
The key here is a good writer. Someone who understands not just grammar, but also storytelling, clarity, and SEO. Typing is simple; writing is hard. You wouldn’t ask your dentist to build your house just because they can use a drill, so don’t designate yourself or someone else to write your blog just based on keyboard clickety clacks.
Time
By far the biggest pitfall of a blog is that, like a sourdough starter, it must be fed constantly. That doesn’t mean every day, but it does mean probably every week, at least in the beginning. It’s important that your site have current content, otherwise people wonder if you’re still in business. Once more than a month or two goes by, things start to look stagnant.
Also, it takes a while to develop a content calendar, write a post, edit it, add in links, upload it to your blogging platform, pick and make imagery, publish it, and promote it. And you have to do that at least once every week.
And we haven’t even touched the time and energy the technical side of setting up a blog — and maintaining it — takes.
OR, a Bang-Up Content Agency
If you don’t have the time, skill, or energy to do those three things (and to be fair, they are really big things), you can always hire a content agency. May we suggest Edify (that’s us)?
It can be hard to stomach the costs of hiring people to do what seems, externally, so easy. But think of it this way: If it were so easy, you would have an amazing blog that filled your online sales funnel already.
Because it’s hard, and you and your business deserve to see investment in time and money pay off. If you don’t know what you’re doing, or hire someone on Fiverr, you’re going to get exactly what you pay for.
At Edify, we love helping our partners take something off their plate and then delivering them content that works. Our clients see an increase in pageviews, site authority, and visibility. They realize that once prospects have a better understanding of what their own problems are and how businesses can solve them, it’s easier to make sales.
We’d love to hear from you, and our initial consultations are always free. Reach out! We can help, and we’re also pretty fun to talk to, if we do say so ourselves.
