Do you need a blog when you’re starting a new business? When the average blog can take around four hours to write, it’s a timely investment in content marketing but does it help launch and grow a business?
Blogs are great for a lot of businesses. At the same time, I want to remind you that a blog needs to fit into a wider content strategy. If you’re going to invest in a blog, then you need to understand the purpose of those blogs, what you want to achieve and how they are going to work towards your big plan.
So, how does a blog help a new business?
1. Blogs build trust
It’s quite likely that your first few customers are going to be people that you know. Depending on the product, your sales cycle might be a few weeks or a few months, maybe even a year. From the point at which someone discovers you to the point at which they buy from you depends on the hard work that your content does to build their trust.
A blog is a big part of this. Let’s say you’re brand new and don’t have lots of client reviews and testimonials yet. In this case, you want to showcase your knowledge. Blogs are a great way to do this.
If you’re a service business, then you can use your blog to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise. You have everything you need in your head and you simply need to get it onto the page. This helps your first few clients overcome any objections they have to being the first clients.
If you’re a product business then a blog can really help build that initial trust in your product. You can go into greater depth about its quality, provenance, and how it works. This is an opportunity for your to showcase why you developed the product in the first instance. And share that with the people who you know want to buy it.
2. It builds integrity
Integrity is important in building trust. When you are reaching out to people who have met you a handful of times in life, they might not get a sense of your honesty and principles from those meetings. You can build on your good foundation by showing what you do.
It’s a chance to tap into your creativity and demonstrate everything that you know. This is especially important for a service business where the folks who will hire you will want to get to know you.
The same is true for product businesses. If you have a blog it shows you care about keeping your website updated. This means there is likely to be someone on the other side doing all that good customer service.
Your website is your shop front and your blog is a big part of making that look its absolute best.
3. Blogs help improve your SEO
If appearing in search engines is part of your plan then you really need to start blogging RIGHT NOW. It takes a good few months for your initial hard work to start paying dividends.
Having a regular blog going out will help bring in organic clients. Again, it keeps your website fresh and relevant so you’re more likely to rank for your keywords. Remember that SEO is answering your audience’s questions. So the more SEO content you can publish, the more you can answer those questions. This, in turn, builds that trust again.
Plus, if your business is new, having some blogs and website traffic will definitely help if you want to use paid adverts to supplement the organic leads you’ll be getting.
4. It’s blinking helpful
If your potential customer is looking for something and you have the answer, then that gives them a good first impression of your business. You’ll get bonus points if you also make your blog entertaining.
Helping people is one of the best ways to build a relationship with them. It is these relationships that often turn into customers.
You’ll often hear marketing peeps talking about your customer “problem” but it’s not always obvious what that problem is. And people don’t have just one problem, they have lots of barriers that make life the wonderful complex tapestry it is. If you can tap into these with your blog and give people direct answers, then it feels good and helps attract customers to your business.
5. It builds your community
You’ll want a community and audience around your brand filled with lots of people who are interested in buying from you or working with you. Blogs help do this. They are one part of a bigger content picture that makes people feel connected with what you do.
Take this blog here, it doesn’t exist on an island by itself, it’s part of a bigger journey. You might go ahead and join my Thursday Brew newsletter where you get a thoughtful long read every week. Or you might check out some of my other blogs.
When a person feels part of what you do or sell, they get a deeper connection with your business. Often they can see something of themselves in the content you create and services you provide. Blogs help do this as part of a wider content strategy.
6. You can fail when no one is looking
If your business is new, then there is a big chance not many eyes will fall on those first few blogs. This means you can test out ideas and fail when no one is really looking. Even though I write for a living, I still cringe at some of the earlier blogs on this website. I got to fail when no one was looking, refine what I do and then go back over those old blogs to make them better.
So that when people like you are dropping on this site, you’re reading the good stuff. Things I that I think will help you.
How blogging can grow your business?
Ultimately a blog can help grow your business by generating organic visitors to your website. They land on that lovely SEO blog and then want to find out more. So they go and read a blog about how your product works and helps people just like them. And then they go and sign up to your mailing list where they get to know you a whole lot more.
Blogs can also help you resell to existing customers. If you’re getting questions from clients, you can point them to a blog. Or help reengage someone who used to be a customer and hasn’t been back for a while.
What is the purpose of writing a blog?
Finally, blogs are a powerful way to help market a new business. The hard work you do today will still be paying dividends in years to come.
Blogs exist to answer questions that your customers or future customers have. As a result of this, they bring in organic traffic, help build trust and ultimately lead to sales. There are different kinds of blogs that can help a new business do this and, of course, you can use that blog content to create a whole content system.
But blogs do need to exist in a wider content ecosystem to really get the most out of them. And who wouldn’t want to get the most from a blog?
Need some blogging help?
I run a live Blog Confidence course with a small group of business owners three times a year. Find out when the next Blog Confidence course is taking place here.