As social media is becoming more and more popular, many businesses are opting to blog about industry information on their corporate websites. While blogging works great for some businesses, it’s not necessarily for everyone.
If you’re on the fence about whether to blog or not, let’s talk about some of the primary pros and cons that should help you make that choice.
One of the main advantages of blogging is the ease in which you can reach your target audience and connect with your customer base. For example, maintaining a blog is an extremely convenient way to write a post and get it in front of numerous people who are interested in your business.
Rather than trying to reach people by email, telephone and a variety of other ways, you can simply write a blog post where everyone who is interested can easily find it. This is especially beneficial if you operate your business on a national or global scale. In this way, you can maximize your impact while minimizing your effort.
Another benefit is the search engine optimization (SEO) value that blogging can bring to your corporate website. By posting valuable content on a continual basis, it’s likely that backlinks will pop up from readers who like your blog.
For example, a person might “like” a post on Facebook or “tweet” a post on Twitter so he can share your content with his friends or followers. When this happens, it tends to provide your website with backlink juice that will often boost your page ranking on Google and other search engines. As a result, you should experience a higher volume of organic traffic and hopefully increased sales as well.
Along with this, blogging is a great way to build trust with your target audience. By creating insightful posts for your readers, you should be able to establish rapport and solidify yourself as an authority in your industry. This tends to happen because blogs often have a sense of “humanness” to them where potential customers and existing customers can get to know you on more of a personal level rather than as a marketing machine. Since trust is often the foundation of a successful business, blogging can be an effective way to win your audience over.
In terms of cons, there are a couple negative aspects of blogging. Perhaps the biggest one is that many bloggers end up running out of fresh content after awhile. While the initial phases may go smoothly, some people find blogging to be a chore and end up scrapping it once they run out of ideas. In other cases, you simply may not have the time to consistently contribute to a blog. When this happens, readership often declines and your blog will have minimal impact.
The other con is the fact that people can leave negative comments on your blog or talk negatively about it on other places like social media sites. In some cases, consistently negative comments can tarnish a business’s online reputation and potentially hurt sales.
Before starting a blog, it’s important to weigh both the pros and cons. If you do decide to blog, you should make sure that you have the passion, enthusiasm and time to put into it. You should also be aware that it usually takes time to get subscribers. Nonetheless, when done correctly, blogging can be a valuable asset to your business.
About the author: This article was contributed by 360 Online Marketing, a Boulder web design company.
Photo credit: Dominik Gwarek