Remember back in 5th grade when you’d teach what you just learned to younger kids? Your classroom would pair up with another classroom from Kindergarten or 1st grade. They’d come into your room or you’d go to theirs and maybe you’d sit with some young kids and you’d teach them spelling, vocabulary, or other basic things you yourself had just learned. It was kinda fun, a lot of work, and made you feel really old.
Blogging is a lot like that. On five different occasions in the last two weeks someone has asked me, “What’s the point of blogging? Why should I be blogging?” Even if you want to be blogging every day, you may not know what to talk about.
Let’s call blogging what it is: writing
“Blogging” is just a term thought up to make it sound different and new. Let’s call it what it really is: writing.
People write for a few different reasons, and a blog is no stranger to these three reasons:
- Personal memories and sharing news
- Giving advice
- Writing a story (fiction, non-fiction, historical, whatever)
The SuperPixel blog is a bit of 1 and 2. But no matter what your industry, you can at least be involved with one of these.
What’s in it for me?
Just like when you were in 5th grade teaching 1st graders how to spell, you learn when you teach others. You master your own subject more. Blogging can be a bit like teaching people of all ages about an industry.
No one’s saying you have to go spilling all your big secrets and special projects all the time. But if you’re a new business you can talk about how it’s been starting the business, the problems you’ve faced, and what you’ve done since you started. It can be of help to other people elsewhere who are from your competition.
What’s in it for my business?
If your competition did read your blog and glean every secret they could from it and used it against you, your business is still better off. They’re just the copycats. You’re the original, and you have the original thoughts and ideas. They won’t ever have that.
Google will reward you with the “authoritative content” that it craves. With that comes more traffic and more traffic coming across your site is never a bad thing. It’s the best free advertising you can give yourself for practically nothing. Just don’t always make it about yourself. Be humble.
Will blogging increase my website traffic?
At right is a snapshot of our Google impressions and clicks traffic over just the last month. It’s tripled in about a month.
We’ve been blogging regularly, about 1-3 times a week, and the impressions are increasing and with it, the clicks. We can tell that our website is getting linked to from places we’d never head of, too. All those back-links increases the authority and value of our site and domain. Google responds by increasing our rank in search engines for things we blog about, but also things we don’t.
As our blog increases in value, so too does the rest of our site, which means we rank higher for phrases like “SuperPixel”, but also for things like “Indianapolis Web Designers”. Which is great for our bottom line. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re only a few months in.
Blogging regularly is good for you, your business, and your revenue, especially if you sell things online or do most of your business online like we do.
I can’t think of any industry that shouldn’t or wouldn’t benefit from a blog. It’s the single-best thing a person can do to increase their website traffic and the value of their site. It’s also the single-best thing a person can do to increase their followers online.
It’s not quick, it’s not easy, but it works slowly and surely. We believe it’s so important to the success of a site we’re encouraging all of our clients to blog and helping where we can. If you don’t have time to write yourself, find some people who can help. Or, better yet, find people who have benefited from your work and ask them to share a story about their experience. If you get just one person a month to do that, you’ve covered a quarter of the minimum amount of posting you should be doing in a month.
Don’t give it up, don’t abandon it.
What should I blog about?
Even if you think your business or website is relatively boring or couldn’t lend value to people, think about your own self. Ask yourself, “What would I want to read?”
For our part, we sometimes write about things that would impact other businesses, sometimes things that impact other web developers and designers. Sometimes we write about really odd ball things, like cell phone plans. Our most popular posts are on Ting phones and banks.
You could write about new products, recipes, services, or policy. We’re preparing to launch a series of posts aimed at high school teachers teaching web design, for another example. Even if all you did was complain about things, so long as it’s entertaining people will take notice eventually.
If you’ve ever thought, “I wish someone had told me that”, you should write about it. If you’ve ever thought the Internet lacked information about a particular niche, specifically if they target cities or states, you should write about it. Just as a business serves a need in a given community, so too does a blog and website on the Internet.
