Does my business really need a blog?

In Crush It!, Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Your website is for communicating logistics and facilitating sales, your blog is for communicating the essence of your brand.”

What exactly does that mean? It means that there are two aspects to business, your products and services you sell, and the relationships you have with your customers and clients. The website has some content that helps people understand why they should buy your products and how they can go about doing that.  Your blog puts a face to your website and helps people connect with you.  When people are connected they are more likely to believe your products are what they need to fix the problems that they have (which is what your trying to do right?)

If you can have a community of people that you are talking to and interacting with through your website (blog) you have direct access to influence them with your sales and new products. In his book Gary also talks about doing an advertising campaign where he gave out free shipping codes.  He put up a billboard which caused 170 orders, did a radio ad which brought in 240 orders, did a direct mail campaign which brought in a little over 300 orders and then he sent it out on Twitter and that brought in 1700 orders in 48 hours.  Now for Twitter to be effective he had to have the audience and followers to respond to that “ad” but the response from the community was much larger when he had previously built a relationship with his followers.  The other point I’d like to make here is that the traditional media ads cost him $7500 while twitter was free.  That’s tremendous ROI and as your followers increase so will the potential for sales.

In addition to being able to influence your readers, a blog allows you to quickly and easily add new content to your website which gives you more content for Google (and thus potential customers) to find you.  If all you have is a handful of products there isn’t much content for the search engines to index.  The more content you have the more likely you are to rate higher in the search engines and thus receive more traffic.

A blog can be a great tool, but IF YOU DON’T WANT TO INTERACT WITH YOUR AUDIENCE (respond to comments, post articles on a fairly regular basis, or respond to emails if you get them) then the value of a blog will mostly be lost and could actually hurt your brand (and thus sales). Your audience wants to know you care about them and you are still passionate about what you are selling.  If you find a blog that hasn’t been updated in months, it makes you think that person no longer cares about their business or the products they were selling.  It needs to be kept up to date and your audience needs to feel like they are a part of the conversation and experience.  If you are going to work on your blog it can be a huge marketing tool and a great way to build a customer base and passionate followers.

If you are interested in starting a blog but don’t know how you can read this post on creating your first blog post.


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