With most brands placing their focus on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, many business owners question the need to run a blog at all.
Some claim people don’t read business blogs anymore, others just say blogging has low ROI.
We’ve helped grow hundreds of blogs and we can tell you with confidence: if you’re neglecting your business blog you are losing big time.
Yes, even in 2023.
Here’s why.
Blog posts are search engine landers.
Whenever someone tells you that “people don’t read blogs anymore” they mean the majority of the Internet users don’t follow updates on any particular text blog. But that has always been the case!
People read blogs by landing on them from Google search results.
As a business, you should not be counting on building some kind of cult following.
There are business owners that have expectations like that – and as a result they run boring company-centric news blogs that get no traffic.
Instead, use your blog to give your audience what they want.
Your blog is your own real estate
The content you host on your own business website is as safe as it gets. No one will ever take it down, report your profile, block it, or restrict it.
If the majority of you content marketing takes place on someone else’s property – you are risking everything you have.
Social media accounts get banned more often than you think, and having most content on your own domain is the best hedge against that risk.
Moreover – almost all social media sites will limit your reach algorithmically in order to trick you into buying more ads.
This creates a lot of dependence and unpredictability – the two things you want to avoid in your business.
Your only chance to get true data
When you are running and hosting your own blog, you have a chance to get full, rich, and useful data about your audience, their interests, and the keywords you need to target.
Not only you track and study your main business-related semantics, but you also discover new topics, keywords, and ideas from your analytics data!
Producing detailed content on broad topics will give you exactly that when done right.
No third-party tools ever will give you that data. In fact, businesses often miss keywords critical to their business due to low or zero search volume in third-party tools.
To emulate that process without a blog you’d need to run expensive surveying and market research campaigns. Instead, just run a well-planned blog and rake in more and more ideas for promotion and positioning.
Blogging is cheap – if you plan it well
One of the main reasons businesses give up on blogging is because good content costs money. To be safe and get consistent content quality you’d need to spend around $100 per article, and professional industry writers charge way more than that.
Blogging without a purpose or a plan is similar to gambling. The expenses are constant, and ROI is unpredictable.
In order to minimize guesswork in blogging and make sure your blog posts are targeting the right search keywords you need to create a professional data-based content plan.
Once you blog according to a plan, running an effective traffic-generating blog
Blogging is a long-term advantage
Consistent blogging builds up your website’s traffic in a slow and steady manner.
You can get quick traffic boosts from viral content, or ads, or influencer marketing campaigns – but your blog traffic is something that stays with you over the years.
Frequent blog traffic audits will help you stay on point with your content production and focus on things your audience cares about.
In a year, your competition will need one year to catch up with you.