The Paradox of Blogging

Blogging is paradoxical.  Almost every business should be blogging, but few find the time to do it.

Why Blog?

First of all, why blog?  Quality written content in the form of blogging has been shown to bring in a lot of web traffic or clicks to the blog. Many of these clicks become leads and later clients.  Furthermore, by being in business, you are by definition an expert in your field.  By blogging, you help to establish that position while also gaining a reputation for giving back to your community.  In addition, other parties can comment on your blog, meaning they’re thinking about your business. Top of mind time for your business is a good thing.

Social Media Benefit of Blogging

Publishing your own blogs also gives you a perfect reason to share the blogs on social media, another know SEO (search engine optimization) enhancer.  Why not let the worlds of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook know that you’re offering valuable information for free?  While you’re at it, throw in a few hashtags so that the general public can find and benefit from your knowledge.

Excuses for not Blogging

So why not blog?  Our experience tells us that there are three main reasons for not starting to blog or letting the blog slip, shortly after having established it.

1) Writing is soul-draining and time consuming.  It’s not an easy task for people who are not professional writers to produce great content, even if they are experts in their field.  Think back to the essays you had to write in high school or college.

2) Deep down inside, people feel that the blog does not produce results.  That’s probably because they are looking at the wrong results.  Rather than searching for loads of comments on your blog, instead search for blog-related web traffic, leads and ultimately clients who were drawn to you by the blog.

3) Blogging takes time to have a beneficial effect, sometimes up to six months in our experience.  It’s easy to get fed up with blogging when short-term fires have to be put out.

Helpful Blogging Tips

Start with an editorial calendar of topics to blog on.  When the creative juices are flowing, it’s more efficient to formulate a series of future topics.  A pre-planned editorial calendar will save you the torture of having to both think of the topic and later to write about it.  Of course, if a timely or newsworthy topic arises that’s not on your editorial calendar arises, go with it.  The editorial calendar eases your burden, but should not preclude you from writing about other topics.

Ensure that you have a second person editing the blog.  There are very few people who can write a 100% grammatically correct, logically flowing blog without another person checking their work.

Images – Ensure that you enhance your blog with attractive, relevant images or even video.  Otherwise, your blog may be boring and fewer people will want to read it.

Unique Content – If you merely copy somebody else’s blog, it will not help you to be found on the web and may have negative SEO consequences. So create new, insightful blogs that represent a contribution to knowledge.

Spammers – If you’re sharing your blog properly, the spammers will quickly find you.  Unscrupulous people have developed automated techniques for commenting on blogs with a view towards gaining back links or drawing attention to their own business.  Wordpress blogs are notorious for this phenomenon.  If the comment is generic and does not specifically reference your material in a thoughtful manner, you can be sure that it’s spam.  Set your comment filter so that comments cannot be published without your approval.  Delete any spam comment before it gets published.

Seeking Outside Help

Now that you’ve determined that your business must blog in order to be found on the web, but you can’t find the time to blog yourself, seek outside help.  You should find a company that will do most of the onerous, time consuming work, but still maintain the authenticity of your blog (meaning it’s from you).  This means that you’ll still have to offer your valuable insights into your industry, but with a much lesser time commitment.

At Leading Edge Digital, we’ve developed a system in which we do about 90% of the work, leaving our clients with only 10% of the tasks.  We find that this ratio maintains a highly authentic, aesthetically pleasing blog, but with a minimal, manageable time component from our clients.  Nearly all of our blogging clients have doubled or tripled their organic leads, most of which are directly attributable to their blog.

Quite simply, Google and other search engines reward great content, content that answers the searchers’ queries, with high rankings, resulting in more clicks. Blogging is a great way of providing this high quality content.