Why every business owner needs a blog
Maybe you’re a business owner or want to be one. Either way, people come to you because you specialize in a certain service or product. Customers assume that you know the ins and outs of whatever it is you’re promoting. So you should not only have a website, but a blog as well. I’ll tell you why in this episode. You can listen here:
Here’s the transcript from this podcast episode, please excuse typos!
In this episode I’m going to explain why every business owner needs to own a blog. Maybe you own a business or maybe you want to own a business. Either way, people come to you because you specialize in a certain service or product. And of course your potential customers assume you know the ins and outs of whatever you’re promoting. Maybe you build websites or you fix houses, or you own a bakery. Maybe you’re a musician, or you specialize in home care for senior citizens. Either way, you most likely already have a website.
Now if you do have a website. The real question here is, Do you also have a blog. Pretty much every business owner comes my way looking for help doesn’t happen, and never understand why that is. I suppose they don’t really understand why they need one, or what it actually is. I mean that’s actually the truth, most people don’t even know what a blog is often when I try to explain it to them they look at me as if I have green skin and come from the drama galaxy. So I’m going to go through the differences between a website and a blog first so that you understand the difference, a website is static, meaning it doesn’t really move or change unless you update it. It typically has content to explain what you offer, maybe with some photos, some personal or company information, and a way to contact you. Whereas a blog is dynamic, meaning it constantly changes because you’re adding new content on a regular basis. Instead of the content explaining what you offer. It has content regarding the industry that your offerings are in, think back to when you were a kid in school. Your teacher would draw mathematical graphs or equations on a whiteboard, and then explain them to you, you’d sit there and jot down all the information because you are learning something and you want it to remember it all, unless you were drawing doodles or playing games in the back of your class, talking to your friends and passing notes. I mean yeah we’ve all been there. But when you are actually interested in the topic, and you are writing that information down, you are learning something. Usually after class, the teacher would erase the whiteboard for the next day, then the next day they would write something different for you to learn. Now let’s say every day, every whiteboard is a blog post. And each time your teacher posts content on the whiteboard, it’s similar to you posting content on a page on your blog, and every whiteboard from every day in school now lives forever, as a page on your blog. That information is always there for people to read and learn something new. Nobody wants to go to a class where they learned the exact same thing every single day, and it never changes. That’s a website, a blog changes, you add new content to it every day, if you can.
One of the main reasons you want a blog as a business owner is because you’re getting content out to people who are interested in learning about what it is you provide. So let’s say you’re a dog groomer, and a damn good one, dogs love you and your business is thriving, which means you are thinking about moving into a bigger shop. Once you do that, you’ll have to hire more people. And of course, getting more customers. This means that you’ll have to do more marketing, and that also means you really need a blog. Instead of talking about your dog grooming business, your blog should explain different topics about dogs. So maybe you explained the different types of breeds, and which ones have a better temperament than others. You might want to tell people how to keep their dogs healthy through nutritional facts that you’ve done your research on where you might want to write about what kind of food you might want to feed them, or how to properly groomed them in between sessions, or just how to make sure your dog is happy but keeping them active. You can even write a blog post about common symptoms that tell you there’s something wrong with your dog. There are so many things you can write about when it comes to animals, pets, dogs or even cats that can help people learn more about how to take care of their pets properly. And that’s the first thing a blog does, it helps your customers understand your industry, a little more. At the same time, it shows them that you’re credible and that you have knowledge in the industry, and expertise in the services that you’re providing this way they’ll trust you. And that’s super important.
When someone is giving you their dog and trusting you to take care of them, they need to make sure you are trustworthy, and that you’re knowledgeable. That’s why reading your content first might lead them to hire you for whatever service you provide. The second thing blogs do, is they get your business in front of more people, because the search engines, including Google preferred blogs or websites. That’s because they like content that constantly changes, new posts being added with new information, versus the same old thing that’s just sitting there for weeks, months, or even years. Typically, blogs with freshly updated content get pushed up in the search engine ranks, which means when you search online and type in say dog groomer, your blog might pop up on the first page results. You might have heard of people earning a hefty sum of income from their blog by having ads on it. That only works if you have 1000s of people subscribing to it, and commenting and sharing it. But the truth is you could make money from your blog if it gets popular, which means you really have to start a conversation with people. That’s what blogs do. Also they start conversations, maybe you’re a nutritionist and one of your forms of revenue is when you sell a client, a nutritional supplement. So write a blog post about that supplement, its benefits, the history behind it, maybe even the history behind nutrition in general, people love to learn new things, especially when they are putting something in their bodies.
So after someone reads your post. Maybe they leave you a comment or ask you a question, the conversation begins. Maybe someone took the supplement and it caused an adverse reaction if they got a rash or something. Maybe you’ve seen it before and you know why and you can help them. Well, it’s the perfect opportunity for you to start a conversation with them. Who knows, maybe they’ll end up hiring you as a nutritionist, it sounds like people need your expertise, and instead of just doing research on Google, about supplements. They might actually want to talk to somebody about it. And that’s where you come in. But in all of these different things, the most important reason to have a blog is to help you stand out from all the other competitors out there. Let’s say you’re a videographer, and you have a small video company where you provide commercials and videos for companies in the area, and you want to stand out from all the other videographers in the area. Oh, how do you do that. Duh, you start a blog. Maybe all those videographers don’t even have a website. They just rely on showing off their video reel to potential customers who do have a website, but not a blog, well by creating one, you’re going to be a step ahead of them. So how do people actually hire you from this, that’s what a lot of people ask me, well how do I make money from a blog.
Well here’s an example, say you’re a parent, and you don’t know how to record your child’s high school graduation, or how to record their birthday party with camera. Some people don’t want to actually do the work, because they either don’t know what equipment to buy or how to use equipment. In my experience, most people don’t know how to set up a professional camera, which microphone to use, whether or not they need lighting, which video editor to use these are the type of things people don’t know the answers to and they search for those answers online. So what you do is you explain your thoughts and expertise in different blog posts, so that when someone comes to the internet and they search for how to record my son’s karate competition, your blog post shows up and explains it. The title can even be how to record your children’s special events, and then inside your post you can put three to 500 words on how to do it after reading the posts, someone might think, you know what, I’m just gonna hire this guy.
People will literally hire you because of your blog posts, so keep that in mind, that’s how people get a lot of jobs. I know I have over the past couple decades. Just keep in mind when running a blog post, don’t give away too much information, or else they might not need you. Give them tidbits here and there, without explaining everything completely. Maybe give them half of the answer and if they want more they have to ask you. Remember, you want to start a conversation. There’s a really cool trick I like to use to get my blog out there even more. It includes reading keywords in articles, and you want to use buzzworthy keywords. Let’s say you’re a graphic designer, and you’re looking for more print work or logo design work. Well then you’ll want to use certain words that people in the graphic design industry, or people who are searching for a graphic designer on the internet are typing in such as logo design business card design brochure graphics marketing graphics and things like that. So make sure you’re adding keywords like this, the ones that people typically search for on Google. And if you’re not sure which ones to use, then go to Google and type in a search for things that you think people are searching for based on your industry. Either way, you’ll get a bunch of results to give you some ideas on popular search queries.
Once you have your keywords figured out, you want to add the links to some of them. They should link to other articles about graphic design from journalists who have written about those topics as well. Those are called backlinks. And what you do is after you post those links on those keywords in your blog, you can then mention to these journalists on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Reddit, or wherever they are that you mentioned their article in your blog because you really liked what they wrote. Sometimes it starts a conversation with that journalist, and you don’t just want to link to articles that journalists wrote but also bloggers, so you want to end up reaching out to bloggers as well. Maybe your blog gets popular enough that you can reach out to other blogs and see if you can become a guest blogger, where they’ll let you write a post on their website and now you can get backlinks to your website from theirs, and get more business and more people to see your content.
The best part is most blogs don’t have to be much longer than 300 to 500 words, that’s typically the sweet spot for Google’s SEO, or search engine optimization and three to 500 words is pretty much all the time people have to read nowadays with the attention spans being so low once you get past 500 words you kind of start to lose them on the last end of the article, so I’d suggest to keep it short, 300 to 500 words, you can go over a few months, not that big of a deal I’ve seen blog posts go to 1000 2000 words but typically the ones they get read the most are short, in terms of frequency, you should write a blog post at least once a week, typically on Mondays and that way you can share it on all of your social media for people to read all week long. Make sure you post it everywhere, email to your friends, your family, you really want to get the word out for each post. And then once you start feeling comfortable posting an article once a week, you should start seeing people comment on your posts or asking you questions or even calling you to hire you for your services or product.
The last thing I want to touch on is the title of your blog post. It’s always smart to start off with how, what, why, where, or even using a number like how to properly brush your dog’s teeth, or five steps you can take to lose weight or what to wear to your best friend’s wedding, or three reasons why you should think about meditating. Once again, you want it to sound like they’re going to learn something from your blog. Also, if you’re using WordPress which I highly recommend, make sure you add tags in the tag section, they’re going to be basically the same as the keywords you used. I actually have a couple of tutorials on my YouTube channel that show you how to create blog posts, so check it out, you can find my channel playlist on my website. In the end, every business owner should not only have a website, but a blog, because that’s the way to really get to your customers and to really have them understand that you know what you’re talking about. And of course that they should hire you for the service you’re providing or the product you’re selling. I hope you learned something in today’s episode. If you did, please share with your friends.
