Subscribe via RSS Feed
I got an email earlier today from a marketing company announcing an upcoming webinar on the topic of blogging for business:
I initially thought to myself that the webinar is just about 4 or 5 years late. Don’t most business understand the value of a blog at this point?
The answer is most likely no.
There are too many business that do not blog, do not care for blogging and do not consider it a real marketing technique. Okay, so maybe the marketing company did a poor job targeting/segmenting their email list. So, they are a little lazy. I can live with that.
The one part of the email that irked is the last bullet point:
Why blogs are an affordable, easy-to-manage marketing strategy that help you acquire new business
That might have been the case a while back, but the truth is that blogs require considerable effort, time and resource commitment both on the blog and off the blog. As more blogs come to existence, content as a marketing strategy becomes more difficult and more crowded.
I recently had a conversation with a client who was thinking about starting a blog as a way to attract organic traffic to his site. Here are few thoughts from that conversation:
There are usually two main goals for a blog:
- Drive a number of backlinks to the blog/site which increases the domain authority/trust.
- Establish a community around your brand.
While a successful blog is very rewarding, it takes a while (6 months if not more) to get a blog to the successful stage. The time spent on the blog is split between 50% on the blog itself and the other 50% is actually on activities outside of blog. Outside activities include commenting on other blogs, writing guest posts, and communicating with others who are interested in the topic of the blog.
A good blog should have a minimum of 2 posts per week. Having 3 or 4 posts per week will be better. We usually expect a blog to take around 15-20 hours of work per week. Having a dedicated writer will make things a lot easier. but of course with a dedicated writer, there are yet additional costs you have to worry about.
What do you think? Am I correct in thinking that blogging is not as easy as many claim it to be? Do you think that starting a blog can still help generate traffic to an ecommerce site? Have you had any success creating a blog for an ecommerce store?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
, and continuing the conversation with people commenting on your blog. We also have multiple people in our office contributing to the blog so it helps spread the workload to keep the activity up – we target having at least 10 posts a week on there..
