I suppose that those of us who are participating in this blogging challenge believe that blogging is in our best interest or we wouldn’t be here. Recently I talked with an internet marketing authority who doesn’t blog. He doesn’t find it useful. When I talked with another friend about it, I realized that he has no reason to blog. He doesn’t have a website and he’s spent a lot of years building his business and his following so he has a very large list to market to without blogging.
My friend does have a website, I have a website. We blog because:
We are concerned about SEO and Google rankings
We need to drive people to our online businesses
We want to increase our visibility
To build relationships
To get our message out to our niche
These seem to be the main reasons to have a blog.
Blogs ensure that your business is listed on the search engines as well as positions you and/or your business as an expert or authority. And blogs are far easier to update than your other web pages.
There are downsides to consider. Blogging is time consuming. Having a blog means making a commitment to write something on a specific schedule. It requires that you create content related to your business on a consistent basis and it should be fresh material in order to keep people coming back each time you post. You might have to develop some writing skills and in many cases, you have to keep abreast of what is happening in your industry or chosen area of business. You’ll need to keep track of what your competition is doing so research will be important.
Should you decide to have a blog, it would be a good idea to use a checklist to help you plan it. A great resource for checklists for internet and digital marketing is a company called The Whole Brain Group of Ann Arbor, Michigan. They have developed a series of checklists to help you create your online marketing plan. In the next blog post we will look at how to use their Sensible Blogging Checklist to ensure you get the most value for the time you spend blogging.
