5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Blog
While it is true that there are many reasons to start a blog, there are certain instances where it can do more harm than good. The truth is, blogging is only beneficial if you have a deep understanding of all the pieces involved. If not, you should steer clear until you are willing to do what it takes to make the blog work for your business, not against it.
What can a blog do for you when it is done right? A business blog can help build a brand, provides an outlet to communicate with target audience members, establishes a company as a thought leader and expert in a given industry, and improves SEO efforts. Seems great, right? As we know, nothing great ever comes easily and for that reason not every business is ready to start a blog. If any of the following sound familiar, then you aren’t ready:
Not Enough Time or Resources
It’s true that having a business blog represents a large commitment. If you’re willing to spend the time and use the resources needed to make it successful, then you should definitely get one going. However, the key to gaining a respectable blog following that will increase visitors to your website is to post content on a regular basis and preferably a few times a week.
Too many companies decide that they want to get into blogging only to have the blog sit inactive for months at a time. For a business, that just isn’t professional. If a website visitor clicks over to your blog and sees that your last post was from six months ago it gives the impression that you are lazy. If you don’t currently have staff members that have the time to write quality posts, you will need to hire one or outsource the work. In other words, if you don’t have the necessary resources that will allow you to post consistently, hold off on creating a blog until you do.
Don’t Understand the Audience
As a B2B marketing professional, you know how important it is to understand your audience. After all, this is exactly what will enable you to target your marketing efforts so that you can attract those who would be most likely to use your service or buy your products. Why should your blog be any different?
Before writing any blog content it’s important to understand the needs of your target audience. What are they looking for online? What kind of content would they find helpful or interesting? What kind of content will they be most likely to share? Before writing you need to be able to answer these questions confidently.
No Promotional Resources
Starting a blog isn’t as easy as launching it, and then hoping people will find it on their own. You need to work hard, at least in the beginning, to build your audience. Sure, if you do a good job of optimizing your blog posts, they will eventually begin to rank in the search engines and achieve visitors from organic search.
However, the key phrase here is “eventually”. This strategy will yield organic traffic, but it could take six months to a year for this to really start bringing in visitors. This a big reason why it is so important to be consistent. The more, high quality content you have on your blog, the easier it will be for people to find your blog from the search engines.
What happens before the search engine traffic kicks in? Don’t you want target audience members to read your posts immediately? In order to achieve readership in the short term it’s important to promote the posts to your opt-in email newsletter subscribers and to your social media following. It’s very difficult to get your posts noticed if you don’t have those two key resources to draw in traffic.
Haven’t Completed Keyword Research
There’s an art to writing a great blog post. First and foremost, you need to make sure that you write with your audience in mind. In other words, you need to make sure that your audience actually likes your content and is excited to read it! However, you also need to take the search engines into account when writing your posts.
How do you consider the search engines? You will need to do some keyword research so that you can get an idea of the keywords that will optimize your content. After that, you need to think about SEO and incorporate keywords naturally into the title and body content of the post to achieve long term exposure. If you don’t have time to complete the keyword research, this isn’t the right time to start a B2B business blog.
No Long Term Content Marketing Goals
Do you know what your long term content marketing goals are? If not, this isn’t the right time to start your business blog. Using a blog as part of a marketing plan for business means that you expect to get something out of it. This means that you need to set goals and work towards achieving them. Without goals you are more likely to push the blog to the side when things get busy. Create an editorial calendar that outlines when you will be writing what posts and stick to it.
We know that it is important to have a business blog. That’s why blogging is something we do for our full service SEO clients. If you don’t have the means to create your blog in-house, letting someone else do it is something to consider.
Categorized in: Content Marketing
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