Is Blogging Dead for Small Business?
I recently wrote a blog post for a traditional martial arts dojo about my first year training in karate.
My motivation for writing this post was to encourage martial-arts-hesitant people to give karate a try. My ultimate goal was to drive more traffic to the dojo’s website and get more members. I don’t see any other local dojos creating new content with any regularity so this will give the dojo a leg up.
But is blogging dead in for small business? Will posting blogs have any impact on raising the website’s profile, much less bring in more membership sign ups?
The short answer is, one way to find out is to try it and see.
The longer answer beings with, “it depends”.
Applying the hobbyist mentality to blogging for business is, indeed, dead. A hobbyist mental is acting upon every harebrained idea when deciding on topics to write about, posting new content only when you feel like it and generally treating your blog like an optional activity.
But if you research your target audience and put them at the centre of your content-building strategy, post on a consistent schedule and measure the results, I think blogging can skyrocket your business.
There are a lot of bloggers online talking about how they made thousands of dollars a week blogging and how you can too. It’s not all clickbait.
Sophia Lee, for example, started as a blogger in 2016 when she was an interior design student, and now has several 7-figure business, all spawned from her blog.
Blogging is Hard Work
If you watch just a handful of Sophia’s videos, she talks about the hard work involved in creating a blog and keeping it going for years and years. In fact, a blogs based business is the polar opposite of a get-rich-quick scheme and she says this many times.
Here are some of the main points that Sophia makes about creating blog content that builds a following and generates revenue (for you or any business):
- A tonne of research is required. You need to get into the shoes of your target audience and put them at the centre of all of your content.
- You need to make a content plan vs. creating posts based on a whim. This plan is based on your audience, current trends and events, seasonal factors, keyword research and more.
- You need to be consistent with posting frequency. Google, much less your audience, is not going to pay you much attention if they see five posts in one week and then radio silence for a couple of months.
- An SEO strategy is essentially to make sure your content reach your intended audience.
- If you don’t care about what you’re writing, blogging will be a miserable process and you will hate it. The first sign of discouragement will make you quit. Even if you’re a professional writer, writing for a business, it will be soul-crushing work if you don’t care about it. Find a way to care or find another niche.
- Blog writing to generate revenue is a long game.
Benefits of Blogging for Small Business
As I mentioned, when I researched the websites of local martial arts clubs, I didn’t see any that had updated blogs.
It’s no wonder why.
Posting regular content takes a lot of work and martial arts clubs, like most small businesses, prioritize activities that will give them a faster return.
But without abundant and well-written content, buying ads to point to your website is not going to result in anything more than a surge of page bounces. And by well-written content, I don’t mean it’s jam-packed with fancy words and perfect grammar. It needs to be well-researched, topical, relevant to your audience, unique and in a voice that your audience understands and appreciates.
Making a dent in your viewership online is a slow game.
For example, I research and implemented a keyword strategy on the dojo website where I train, and it took months before we saw any impact. But when the updates took hold, we saw awesome results.
Still, it required monthly or more upkeep to maintain the momentum.
Getting tangible results from posting blog content will be even slower.
But if you want to get an edge over your competition, you’ll need to go beyond status quo, and that means doing the hard work of creating content for your blog at least once per week.
Featured photo: Bruce Lee sticker pack, artist unknown.
