When And Why To Blog: 5 Steps To Getting Started
If your job involves sales, marketing, or attracting customer leads in any way, knowing how and when to blog is a critical skill. Blogging is a key lead generation mechanism, and a great way to set you apart from your competition. In fact, marketers that prioritize blogging see 13-times the ROI of businesses that don’t.1
But why blog if you already have a website that outlines your company, products, core competencies, and values? Websites are usually about selling, whereas blogs are about educating and engaging with your customers on topics of interest or relevance to them. Blogging can also improve your SEO and drive increased traffic to your website, create word of mouth referrals, and helps you set your business apart as an authority in your particular subject area.
Why is it so hard?
The reality? It’s actually not that hard! However, many individuals can feel intimidated at the thought of blogging because they’re not sure how to best approach it. They may think their ideas are not good enough or think it’s to difficult to come up with a consistent flow of topics to write about that others would be interested in. Yet the truth of the matter is that if you (and your colleagues) are passionate about your product, services, and what your company does in general, you’re already more prepared than you think.
How to get started
First: Choose where you will host your blog. As we mentioned before, a blog can really help drive traffic and SEO for your website, so it is a good idea to incorporate it in some way into your existing site. You can also choose to host your blog on a third-party blog site such as Blogspot or WordPress, but you probably still want to at least link to it directly from your website.
Second: Start brainstorming a list of potential topics so you have a repository of ideas to draw from as you need them. Think of things that can help educate and inform your audience on subjects related to your product, but without just outright making a product plug. For instance, if you sell a cloud migration service, maybe you can write about some best practices for a successful migration, or how to avoid business disruption during the transition, etc. It’s fine to still add a quick plug at the end for your service offering if they want additional help in that area, but the meat of the blog should center around delivering some useful information to your audience. Other topic ideas can include a case study highlight or customer success story, or a short blurb or intro to another thought leadership piece you’ve produced (like an ebook or whitepaper) and linking to the asset.
Third: Get others involved! Don’t forget to tap into the valuable knowledge that other members of your organization have to offer. Maybe try enlisting someone from product development to help explain some intricacies of your product that make it stand out, or have your sales reps contribute blogs answering their most commonly asked questions they get from customers.
Fourth: Be consistent! If you want customers to gain value from your blog and – ideally follow your blog regularly – you need to maintain a relatively steady flow of content. This doesn’t mean you have to post something every day or even every week, at least at first. But you should aim to post content bi-weekly or at the very least monthly. Quality is more important than quantity especially when you’re first starting out – it’s better to put out relevant, well-crafted, and engaging content at a slightly slower pace than to crank out mediocre content at larger volume.
Fifth: Get your hard work out there! A blog is also a great asset to fuel your other lead gen efforts – from social media to email marketing. When you post a new blog, share it out to your social channels or send an email to your prospects letting them know you just shared some information they might find valuable. Your blog is only going to be effective if you get eyes on it.
Blogging can take as much or as little time as you want it to, but the important thing is to just start somewhere. Once you do and start reaping the benefits, you just might wonder why you didn’t get started earlier.
Want help getting started with your blog? Connect with our content specialists at Cadence Preferred today!
