As I teach business owners about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I always encourage them to blog. It’s incredibly important for so many reasons. It’s great for SEO because the search engines love the content. But it also gives you something of value worth sharing on the social media channels. Most importantly, businesses that blog, earn customers from their blogs.
So when I’ve finally convinced someone to blog, they always have two questions. First, they want to know how often to blog. Of course it depends on your goals and your subject matter, but in my opinion, I don’t know that a business can blog too much. 56% of businesses that blog once a month report having gained a client from their blog. That’s probably a good minimum starting place. 78% of those who blog daily report gaining customers from their blogs. And for those who blog more than daily, that percentage goes up to 92%.
As soon as that question is answered (and they start calculating how their going to write or outsource that much content), they want to know what to blog. They tell me that there’s only so much they can write about their product or service before they’ll run out of things to talk about. Sadly, it’s probably this thinking that keeps most businesses on the sidelines when it comes to blogging.
Here’s the thing. Your blog needs to be robust. It probably shouldn’t just be about your products and services. Instead, your blog should be about the topics that interest your customers. Allow me to share some examples.
I work with a great lady who sells fire pit tables. Most of the content she was publishing was about fire pit tables. Makes sense, right? Sure. But even if you’re a fire pit table enthusiast, there’s only so much fire pit table content you can consume before you either know it all, or you get bored. Plus, if you start duplicating your content, that not only doesn’t impress the search engines, it can hurt your rankings.
So what did she do? She asked herself what else her customers were interested in and this opened up a whole world of possibilities. Customers who like fire pit tables might also be into outdoor living spaces, landscaping, cooking outdoors or even camping. Wow, she suddenly has several new topics about which she can blog. More importantly, she may find someone who’s interested in camping coming across her blog and discovering her great fire pit tables. This camper may not have even known he wanted a fire pit table until he read her blog article, “Five Campfire Games and Activities” while preparing for weekend trip with his kids. When he sees her beautiful products, he falls in love with the idea of having a fire pit table in his own back yard. He may not buy it right then and there, but he may browse the blog and decide that it has enough interesting content that he wants to subscribe or at least follow her business on Facebook, which can of course, lead to a sale down the road.
Another business owner that I recently spoke with has plenty to blog about because he rents hundreds of tools and pieces of construction equipment (aerators, generators, skid steers, trenchers, etc.) His inclination was to blog about all the different things that he rents. That’s pretty smart as it’ll impress the heck out of the search engines and make his site authoritative on all the different pieces of equipment that he rents. If you’re in his neighborhood and you do a Google search for something he rents and has blogged about, chances are, his will be a top search result.
But what about they guy who wants to install an invisible dog fence? Might he do a Google search for “tips for installing an invisible dog fence”? Quite possibly. And might he find an article like “How to Install an Invisible Dog Fence”? Also quite possible. And when reading the article, might he discover that renting a trencher is a great way to dig the trench to bury the wire for the invisible dog fence? Yes. And what happens when he finds that the article he’s reading just happens to be written by a business that rents trenchers? Duh!
So if our tool rental business creates blog articles about how to do the jobs that require his tools, he’s going to put his content directly in front of clients who need to rent from him, even those who didn’t know they needed his stuff!
Let’s look at one more example. Personally, I specializes in content creation, infographics and link building. Admittedly, that’s the majority of what I write about here. But I’ve also written blog articles about Google Plus, pay-per-click, mobile websites and even internet video. These may not be my specialties, but they interest the folks who also need the things I do provide. Not to mention, they interest me. I’m passionate about social media and it’s got a buzz factor that link building doesn’t. If I can lure you in by teaching you how to improve your Facebook edgerank, I might then be able to show you the value of outsourcing a blog or get you to consider using an infographic strategy, both of which I can provide. Clever, aren’t I?
Okay, so you get that you need to blog. And you get that you need to blog often. Now, hopefully you have some ideas about what to blog. If you need help, let me know.
Thanks for reading
David McBee
