Should You Have a Blog?
To blog or not to blog? - Big question.
Just yesterday, a good client said to me, “We’ve got the website set up to include a blog. We need to sit down and talk about getting this blog thing up and running,” and before I had a chance to respond, he had to get off the phone.
Blogging, Facebook, Twitter and Newsletters – Oh My!
This is a client with three businesses with a website for each, a newsletter for each, a Facebook fan page for each, one blog, and three Twitter accounts. And he wants another blog. I had no chance to tell him, “No, I don’t think you should have another blog.”
Blogs are all the rage. There are millions of new blogs being launched all the time. Some of them are quite good. Some bloggers have become rich and famous, like Julia Powell, whose blog became a book and the book became a hit Hollywood movie Julie and Julia.
There are many highly successful blogs in every area of life: marketing, politics, health, personal finance, food, the list goes on and on. But the reality is that many, many blogs lie stale and dormant – collecting dust like an old VCR in the basement that you don’t have the heart to toss out.
For small business people, or for any business people really, blogs seem attractive because they’re new and seem to be on the cutting edge. But blogs are tremendously demanding. The require time and expertise – time to write, time to research, time to develop ideas about what to blog about, time to understand how to blog effectively, etc, etc. Either you have to do all that, or you have to hire someone to do it for you.
And if you’re already doing a newsletter and other types of marketing, do you really need to add a blog?
So even though we have only just met, I’m hereby granting you permission to not have a blog. It’s doubtful that your business will live or die on this decision. However, if you must have a blog, and you’re a decent writer and you have interesting and useful things to say AND blogging fits into your overall marketing plan, then yes, please go for it.
Five reasons to have a blog:
Greater reach for your business.
A blog can build trust.
Brand awareness.
Instant feedback (if you have a decent readership).
Monitor your industry (if you have readers).
Five reasons not to have a blog:
Your customers and prospects don’t read them.
Time constraints.
Other marketing initiatives are more effective.
Too technically challenging.
Doesn’t make sense for your business.
The decision to have a blog or to not have one rests entirely on the nature of your business or organization, whether blogging is a good fit for your overall marketing efforts, whether you have the resources to blog consistently and most important of all, whether a blog will reach the people you need to reach.
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