You run a business—so why start a blog?
You teach fitness or sell tires or repair foundations. You’re really good with the tools of your own trade but not verb tenses. Maybe you even dislike writing.
But you still need to communicate, and a blog is the best way to do that.
According to getcodeless.com, companies that publish 16 or more blogs per month create 3.5 times more traffic and 4.5 more leads than those that publish zero to four blogs per month.
Another way to look at those stats: You can get way out front of your competition by blogging.
Notice that we said you need to start a blog. That doesn’t mean you need to fill it personally if your time would be better spent elsewhere.
But you, the business owner, must start a blog and make sure it’s full of great content.
You Are the Media Now: You Must Start a Blog
Advertising and marketing changed when everything went digital.
Once, it was enough to buy ads in the local newspaper and wait for carriers to deliver it to the consumer’s mailbox. Publishers owned huge presses, and they might as well have been printing money, not newsprint.
Check out this graph from Journalism.org. Ad revenue for U.S. newspapers peaked around $50 billion in 2006 but was about half that six years later.
Similarly, The Pew Research Center found weekday newspaper print and digital circulation was down by 11 percent from 2016 numbers.
TV viewership is also declining, according to emarketer.com, yet time on mobile devices has increased to almost four hours per day per person in the U.S.
To get your business in front of all those people, you no longer have to go through a newspaper or a TV station. You just have to publish good content and tell people where to find it. You can do that with a cheap laptop or a smartphone.
People didn’t stop looking for information or great stories. They just stopped waiting for a carrier to deliver a paper to their doorstep. Now, the world is out there Googling away and looking for info.
A great blog can deliver it—and create new clients for a business.
Content production is now completely intertwined with marketing. Content is also tangled up with social media, which is another huge part of marketing.
To get in on all the new action, you need to produce content.
Here’s what starting a blog can do for you.
1. Establish Authority
We’ve got a great example of the power of blogging: Two-Brain Business, our sister company.
Its founder, Chris Cooper, started blogging in 2008, and he hasn’t stopped since. You can see his first efforts here. You can see his current efforts on twobrainbusiness.com.
There’s more on Medium.com.
And on twobrain.com, CrossFit.com, EliteFTS.com and other sites. Including this one.
Chris’ work can also be found on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
That list doesn’t include significant podcast output, four printed books, 12-24 ebooks per year and dozens of emails sent to people on an ever-growing mailing list.
At the 2019 Two-Brain Business Summit, I randomly asked many attendees why they started working with Cooper’s mentoring company. The most common answer was something like this:
“I had been reading Chris’ stuff for a while, and I liked it. When I realized I needed a mentor, Two-Brain was the obvious choice.”
At 4 a.m. on a cold morning in 2009, cranking out a blog might have seemed like screaming into a canyon.
When Chris was standing in a room full of happy 400 business owners in 2019, those blogs look like a brilliant long-term investment.
2. Build Your Brand
Who are you? And what is your company?
Not “what are you selling?” A lot of people are selling the same thing.
So why should people buy it from you?
Brand archetypes are popular these days, and you’ll find lots of sites talking about Sages, Outlaws, Explorers, Jesters and Magicians. Brand archetypes are nothing more than a way to define your company and keep your messaging consistent.
And StoryBrand is popular, too. That’s another way to dial in your messaging and create media your clients want to consume. They become the heroes of your story, with your brand as the guide.
But for any of that to matter, you need to have messaging. You need to produce.
It’s also obvious that every business needs a website. And it can’t be empty.
Building your brand starts with your first Instagram post, the color of your logo and the name of your business. But the color of your logo and the hue of your photo edits say subtle things.
Words say powerful things. They’re definitive.
Words start and end wars—and relationships. They motivate people. They make people ask questions. And they provide the answers.
Even better, they’re read by search engines.
Define Yourself
Instead of letting people figure out that your sleek black logo represents mastery and premium quality, tell them that you’re the most expensive steakhouse in town. Regularly.
Describe everything you do, how you do it, why you do it, and how your products and services help people.
Tell your story, which, of course, is also the story of your clients. Then tell that story again another way. Then another. Do it on your blog, and then use pieces of the blogs on social media. Then send the blog out to your mailing list.
Repeat until everyone knows exactly who you are and what you do. Leave nothing to chance by using words to define your brand for the world.
3. Communicate and Retain Members
Marketing is sexy.
Cool ads that generate leads and clients make you feel like a genius, and it’s really fun to watch a spreadsheet fill up with leads from your sales funnel.
But what’s more important than the new customer? The existing customer.
Two-Brain Business teaches marketing, but only after we talk about retention.
In the service industry, you can acquire hundreds of clients and go bankrupt. But you can retire with 150 clients high-value you retain for years.
How do you retain clients? There are many ways, and Two-Brain Business teaches a number of them, but here’s the overarching theme: You need to communicate with your clients. Regularly.
So blog. Not just for potential clients or people you haven’t met. Blog for current clients.
Speak to Your Tribe
As a business, you must talk to the people who know you and tell them more. Keep the conversation going.
Tell them how much you love them, why you love them and how you’re going to keep showing that you love them. Tell them about products or services they don’t know about. Give them your expertise for free, one blog post at a time—adding value to their experience all the time.
If a current client asks you a question about your business, that’s a gift. Answer it for the client, then answer it for all his or her peers on your blog. Then write more about related topics. You’ll help current clients and have answers waiting when prospective clients need them.
Beyond serving your clients, use your blog to educate them. Make them experts on your brand and help them understand why it’s the right choice to be your client. Doing so will help retain your clients, and it will also make them your best salespeople in their circles of friends.
If you start a blog and increase the length of engagement of current clients without acquiring new ones, it’s still a huge win.
4. Warm Leads
People are stalking your business right now.
Look out the window and you might see a string of cars driving by. Perhaps one slows every morning just a little as its driver looks at your sign and thinks about pulling off the road.
Maybe a prospective client is watching everything you do on social media.
Maybe your next high-value client is on your mailing list.
Or maybe a person who will be with you for a decade is clicking on your website right now to see what you’re all about.
If you don’t have any media, you’re just another gym, restaurant or auto shop. And when there’s nothing to separate businesses, clients choose price—which isn’t ideal if you aren’t the cheapest option.
Provide Prospective Clients With Reasons to Talk to You
You must give people a reason to take a step toward your door.
So produce content. Then produce more and more content. Eventually, you’re going to answer a prospective client’s question, solve someone’s problem or impress a person with your expertise and character. Or maybe you’ll just entertain and earn business through a great story.
Either way, leads are warmed through content.
As writer Jon Brosio said, “Writers and bloggers must also be great marketers.”
Content production is now marketing. And vice versa.
The words you produce are now the trail of breadcrumbs leading prospective clients to your door.
5. Acquire Web Traffic
Thousands of blogs have been written about search engine optimization (SEO), search engine results pages (SERPs), traffic generation and web analytics.
We’ve written about it, too: “Produce, Publish, Point.”
The main takeaway from that article: You need to create content.
If your blog is nonexistent, Google is never going to send people to it. That’s obvious.
If you have a blog, you have a better chance to be found.
Imagine two hair salons side by side on the same street. One has a list of services and prices, as well as a blog with tips, product reviews and photos of their stylists’ work. The other has a site with just a list of services and prices.
Which site would you want to visit?
The No. 1 SEO Strategy
There are lots of strategies experts offer to help people get on Page 1 of searches.
Not one of these strategies trumps regular production of quality content. If you start a blog that actually helps people with great info, you have a better chance of climbing the search rankings. Create that sort of content regularly, and you’re guaranteed to see increased web traffic.
Similarly, every piece of great content increases domain authority and builds momentum.
Your growing library increasingly establishes you as an expert resource people will turn to when they need help. When you always produce great blogs, people return to see what you’ve published, they bookmark your page, and they subscribe to your RSS feed or newsletter. Other sites link to you, funneling traffic your way.
With every interaction, people more likely to become clients—or remain clients.
Start a Blog—Today!
If all that isn’t enough to convince you of the value of blogging, here are three more stats, all from HubSpot:
Blogs that support business-to-business marketing generate 67 percent more leads for the creator vs. companies that do not blog.
Blogging companies get 97 percent more web links.
Blogging can make it 13 times more likely that you’ll receive positive ROI on marketing.
So you need to start a blog.
But if the thought of creating it makes you cringe, you don’t have to write the blog yourself.
We can do it for you.
We write, you reap the rewards.
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