Today we will see together if it is still relevant to have a blog
on your website ….
Is it still necessary to have a blog today?
Find in my video my explanations to answer this question:
Here is the presentation material I used to cover this topic:
Why is it still important to have a blog?
Having a blog
has several great benefits:An organic traffic generator
It will be an important, even very important generator of traffic for your website. In particular, a traffic that is particularly interesting, namely the organic traffic. In other words, people will find you on Google. They will discover your articles, and therefore go directly to your website. This approach is completely different from advertising, in that with advertising, you will have visitors on your website, only when you will pay. So, if you stop paying, no one will come anymore, thanks to advertising. Whereas with organic traffic, once you start getting into it, once you start getting it, it’s going to generate traffic for you on a regular basis.
I think that an article is like a stone that you’re going to add to your building, which is your website. So the more solid stones you have, so quality content, the better it will be and the more likely you are to attract organic traffic to your website.
Building audience loyalty
Another element. Thanks to a blog
, you will be able to build a loyal audience. The objective will be to convert one-time visitors into regular visitors, and then convert them into customers. Creating an audience is all the more important if you are not a new company.Increase your visibility
You can increase your visibility thanks to your blog. Indeed, most of the time when we are on the internet and we do a search on google, the results we find are often on websites that contain blogs that we did not necessarily know before. Thus, a website is a very good marketing tool to allow you to gain visibility, in order to convert visitors into customers.
Help to gain authority
For me, a good blog
has for role to bring value and help to visitors. The goal is to help visitors to your site by answering a question or a problem they have. Then, if your help and answers are relevant enough, you will acquire a kind of expert status. You will then be able to capitalize on this expert image, to transform visitors who have specific needs into customers.A platform that you control
One of the big advantages of having a blog is that it is a platform that you will control. Unlike social networks, for example Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… All of these platforms are extremely powerful but be aware that you do not own them at any time. Therefore, if for any reason, these social networks decide to terminate your account, you risk losing everything. If you have for example a Facebook page with a lot of members, if from one day to the next Facebook decides to close the page, you won’t have much leverage to make the decision change. Whereas, when you have a blog, you can post your articles, which you will publish on your website, with a hosting that you have chosen and a domain name that you have purchased.
So concretely, you are more in control of your destiny, and you don’t have a kind of sword of damocles all the time, like you can have with social networks. On many occasions, social networks make algorithm changes, which can lead to significant losses of traffic and revenue. I will have the opportunity to make a video to explain to you, a little more in detail what I mean by all this. With a Blog
, you are free of your destiny, you can write about what you want and especially have the editorial direction that suits you.What are the methods to start a successful blog?
Consistency
I say it often, consistency is the key. If you’re starting a blog, don’t expect to get returns within three days, or three weeks. It’s going to take several months. So much so that I’ve named this phase the desert crossing. Indeed, it is difficult to be patient for 6 months, 1 year before seeing the first signs of traffic from Google. Especially when you create content every day. It is a great period of doubt, and it is quite natural to say to yourself at some point, “my website does not attract anyone, is it really worth it?”. In fact it is worth it, but you have to be consistent and patient.
Patience
I won’t give you any wisdom about patience, as I am by default a very impatient person. But know that in this kind of business, if you have a blog
, you have to be patient especially in the beginning. Patient, does not mean inactive, of course! Simply, you have to be aware that SEO takes time before getting results. The goal is to succeed in reaching a certain stage where there is a snowball effect. When you reach this critical size, getting visibility will be much easier, people will come directly because they know your blog, at the level of backlinks, you will also get more automatically. So the idea is really to reach this critical size as soon as possible.Build a team
If you have a corporate blog, actually, what I recommend is to form a small team, or else try to outsource the web writing. Why? Because once again the key is consistency. Nevertheless, when you have a business, you don’t always have the possibility to spend time creating content, even if ideally you should. Unfortunately, we are not in an ideal world! But overall, it’s really important to build a small team to write content regularly.
Proximity and courtesy
Another topic, really try to have a blog where finally you create some kind of proximity with your audience. For example, you can write with “I”, “you”, and “you”. In short, really try to create a courteous relationship with your visitors. More than a story, a blog is a conversation you’re going to have. On a personal note, for my agency Twaino, I also have a blog
. When I write articles, I simply say to myself:- What could I tell a friend who is about to start a business?
- What are the tips I could give him?
- And what are the tips too?
I’m really looking for something that is in the register of conversation, to avoid having something academic and heavy! So the idea is really to popularize without simplifying and to have a proximity approach
The importance of the structure
You should know that you don’t read a blog on the Internet the same way you read a novel. In a novel, you start on the first page and finish on the last page. On the internet, you don’t read that way! We scan the information, that is to say that we look at the whole article, with the titles and the subtitles, to see the way it is structured. And when there is a title or a sub-title that will really appeal to us, we can start reading. So I really spent some time, in terms of the titles, trying to refine them, so that they are as magnetic
as possible. So I found some numbers on that:- 8 out of 10 people will read your headlines
- 2 out of 10 people will read the text
So you understand how important it is to create titles and subtitles that are going to be relevant.
Consistency in the content
So another important element for a successful blog
is the consistency in the “editorial line”. When you are going to start a blog, I recommend that you start with a niche. Once you start to have an audience, and you are known with that niche, potentially you can start expanding to other topics. But starting small is a really good way to get known as the subject matter expert.Targeting your audience
It is important to have an audience that is well targeted, at first. Because the risk at the beginning is to want to do everything, by treating all the subjects. In this context, you risk going in all directions in the creation of your content. For example, if you are in BtoB and you have a service or a product that you want to sell. Well, eventually if you write about everything, you may get some traffic, but it won’t be qualified at all and won’t allow you to convert. So the goal is really to make sure that you have articles that in a more or less direct way, will lead to a conversion.
Content conversion
So the other point is actually at the level of “content repurposing”, what we call in French, the reconversion of content. The idea is actually quite simple. When you have an article that works, don’t hesitate to re-use this good idea in different types of formats. For example, if you have an article that works well, why not try to turn it into a video? A podcast? As an infographic? It’s even more interesting, because it will allow you to reach audiences that don’t assimilate the content in the same way. There are people who love to learn by reading, for example blog articles, there are others who are more visual, so an infographic can be really good and there are others who prefer to listen to information to retain it, so a podcast can also be effective. Video, is a good mix between the two so really, it’s a good format.
Know your industry
When you’re going to do your blog posts, it’s important to know your sector and your industry. Whether you are in BtoC or BtoB, I would tend to tell you that having a Blog is a marketing tool that you should not be without. From my point of view, having a blog in BtoC is important, having a blog in BtoB is essential. So, if you have a business and you are addressing other companies, really having a blog is ultra important.You will be able to gain visibility and authority. The key to having a blog is consistency and quality. Without these two elements, there is very little chance that you will be able to get your blog off the ground and have organic traffic coming to your website on a regular basis. If you have the difficulties to write, do indeed call upon professional web copywriters. But overall, if you are all alone actually think about outsourcing, the thing, there are people who have very good abilities to write, so overall really, tend towards this kind of thing, it can be important. Because we are not all equal in our ability to write.
Promote your content
Know that in writing a blog, there is a creation part but also a promotion part:
- 20% of time spent on creation and 80% on promotion
From my point of view I think it’s a lot, but the idea is there anyway. So remember to spend time creating but also promoting, especially at the beginning. If you are not known, it is always complicated to have visibility. That’s why allocating time to promotion is essential. Personally, I am rather on the following ratio: 50% of the time creation 50% of the time promotion. 20%/80% sounds like a lot to me actually.
How to promote your content?
Several methods are possible.
Ahrefs
First, I recommend that you use a tool called Ahrefs, which will allow you to see on similar blog posts what other websites have had the opportunity to link to their own websites. With Ahrefs, you’re going to be able to contact sites, telling them the following, “I wrote an article similar to an article you’ve already linked to, therefore would you like to add the link to my article on your website?” This is what will allow you to get backlinks and therefore authority.
BuzzSumo
Second content promotion tool: Buzz sumo. Indeed with Buzz Sumo, you will be able to see which are the most shared articles on a given theme and you will be able to contact people who have already shared a content close to what you have done and ask them to share your own content too. BuzzSumo will allow you to gain visibility.
Conclusion
This article ends now, I hope you’ll be interested. In any case, I think you will have understood, to the question should we still have a blog
today? The answer for me is clearly “YES”. Sometimes, we can see content indicating that “blogs are dead”… For me, No! The generation of organic traffic goes largely, still at the moment by the blogs. So making quality content is important. Be consistent as well, this is a key element. And then, with your blog, you’ll manage to get, a kind of authority status, and you’ll have a much easier time converting your visitors into potential customers. Another element, if you have a blog, you are master of your destiny, you don’t have a kind of sword of damocles on your head, as we can have with social networks. With algorithm changes, from one day to the next, you can find yourself completely “outside of the game”. Whereas with your blog you are responsible for your articles, you have your own website, you have a hosting that you have chosen, you have your domain name that you have bought. In short, your destiny is your own, and therefore you are free to create the content you want and to go in the editorial direction you want. When you are going to create blog posts, try to do it in the register of proximity, consider it, as a kind of conversation with strangers. I know that the tips I can give on my blog are tips that I could give to my friends or my own family. Last thing, remember to do content repurposing when you have something that works on your blog, don’t hesitate at any time to change the format, to turn it into something else, it can be a blog post, into a video, into a podcast, into an infographic. I’m done with that.Thank you very much for your attention and see you soon for the rest…
