Why blog?

21 reasons to persuade yourself or your colleagues you need to blog, blog more or blog better

Are you needing a bit of ammunition to justify the time and energy to invest in a blog? Or perhaps you have a blog and you're looking to increase the frequency or quality of your posts. At Musicademy, blogging is core to what we do to engage existing customers and attract new customers, so this is how we justify our efforts and it certainly is a lot of effort!

So, here are 21 good reasons to get blogging or blog better. And rule number one of good blog writing – blog readers love lists! (As long as they're useful or inspire)

1. Because blogging drives traffic to your website. The blog can feed a stream of tweets, Facebook updates and newsletter content as well as leaving a trail of content for the search engines. For more on the “Blog Central” concept see one of my previous posts.
2. To engage with your audience and collect customer feedback (blogs allow comments and 2-way dialogue. If you get really lucky with a post, your customers will start talking to each other).
3. Because it makes SEO sense - search engines love websites with updated, unique, keyword dense copy. They reward it with a higher page rank. Blogging works for SEO – see this post for an example of this in action.
4. To enable you to sell more – a first visit to your website is like a first date – are you really expecting your customer to go all the way? Woo them. It takes time to develop trust and commitment.
5. To position yourself and your company as a thought leader in your market. This demonstrates your expertise to potential customers, provides post purchase reassurance and also makes you one of the “go to” places for information.
6. To create a place to think, plan and reflect. I find that writing about something often helps me figure out my own opinion on it. It also forces me to really consider the issues and justify my thinking.
7. To make a big impact with zero budget. Sure blogging takes time but it shouldn’t be a work of art. Try to incorporate blogging into your weekly routine. Find windows of time to blog (I’m writing this while waiting for dinner in a hotel restaurant).
8. To showcase products and images and tell behind the scenes stories. You, rather than a journalist, are in charge of your content.
9. Because its a place to be more informal and risqué. Culturally blogs are understood to be far less formal than a corporate website or company brochure. And blogs are a great place for opinion and taking a few risks.
10. Because it humanises your company – people buy from people, not websites.
11. To improve your writing – good for your job and your career.
12. To create content for newsletters. If you are blogging once or twice a week you'll have half a dozen newsletter articles in no time.
13. To play with technology and ideas. You'll improve your digital marketing skills in creating and managing the blog itself, and you could always test drive some new technology for a new post. Writing is a really good way of working out how you feel about a topic - create a list of possible content and work through the ideas in more detail imagining yourself to be a commissioned copywriter.
14. To force you to read and research about your market in order to gather the information you need for your posts whether researching an article from scratch or repurposing content from elsewhere.
15. To collaborate with others – guest posts are really effective and it gives you the chance to interview others in your industry, work with other departments, talk to customers, senior staff and even the odd celebrity.
16. Because there is no need to wait for the webmaster to publish a new page or a journalist to write about your new product.
17. To express yourself and create a historical record of your content – in 3 years of blogging I now have hundreds of entries, a huge archive of brilliant marketing material that we ransack on a daily basis. Those posts answer customer questions, showcase the expertise of the company in an easily searchable online archive.
18. To podcast/videocast easily. Record it (even using your phone), if it's video then upload to YouTube or Vimeo and easily embed the link. You can even drive traffic to your blog from the YouTube content.
19. Because it is enjoyable, compulsive and rewarding. It's astonishing how content flows once you start writing and there is a real sense of satisfaction with hitting the "Publish" button.
20. Because it doesn’t have to be perfect. Although it's good to run a spell check, generally readers don't expect a finely polished article.
21. Because interruption marketing doesn’t work any more.

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