The internet is a crowded space.
It costs very little to get in.
You could literally have a website up and running for your business in an afternoon for less than $5! That sounds great at first, but at scale, the result is a nightmare for small to midsized business owners.
Why? Well… there are approximately 2 billion websites on the internet today!
How do you make your website and business stand out in such a cluttered space? What can you do to help your customers find you instead of the hundreds of other competitors fighting to get that sale? Is there something you can do to drive more customers to your business?
The answer to all of the above is blogging.
Table of Contents
What is blog writing?
One of the first things that business owners do when they take their business online is create a website. A good website is designed well, it has a great interface, and it’s got great content to go with it.
Think of your website like a restaurant. You’ve got to find a great location, pick a theme, buy furniture that goes with it, and everything else that’s involved in that process.
You take a lot of time to set up your restaurant up. As a result, in most cases, you don’t really want to change anything for at least a few years.
But getting your website up, or in this analogy, the restaurant, is the easy bit. It’s the running of it which requires blood, sweat, and tears.
Are blogs then the food you put out? No, that’s your day to day operations.
Blogging is what you do to promote your business.
It could be the flyers you circulate, the radio spot you book – blog posts are the guy you hire to stand outside with a bright, easy-to-read spinning board to attract traffic during peak hours.
Why should you choose a blog writing service for your business?
Mainly because blogging costs a fraction of what you would need to pay for billboards or to run ads on TV… and it’s much more effective.
In fact, publishing blog posts every month on your website would cost you less than half of what you’d spend to put an ad in the paper.
According to HubSpot, companies that publish blog posts 16 times a month get 3.5 times more traffic on their website than companies that blog less than 4 times a month.
This not only proves that blogs are invaluable resources for small businesses, but that regular and effective blogging can also help you attract lots of potential customers to your business.
What Are Some Benefits of Blog Writing?
Blogging can yield many benefits for businesses. If you publish blog posts regularly, you can acquire new leads on a weekly basis and your blog will play an instrumental part in promoting your products and services.
Here’s a video detailing why regular blogging is important for your website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOj3CK8AXaM
The data on this is undeniable.
A study revealed that small businesses that blog get 126% more leads than businesses that don’t!
The ultimate goal when blogging is to establish a regular readership. Blogs that attain this level have access to an ever-growing resource of enthusiasts that they can market to. Blogging creates a brand of loyalty that a billboard or 30-second television advertisement can’t match.
Even big brands like Gillette understand the benefits of blogging. They’ve long shifted from newspaper ads to blogging about the perfect shave and detailed guides about men’s grooming.
It doesn’t matter what industry you operate in. The size of your business doesn’t either.
Visitors to your website expect you to have a blog.
Execute it really well and you’ll have a lead magnet for your business.
Benefits of Blogging for Businesses
1. Great for branding
There are a number of examples of brand placement and promotion on the internet. Successful companies are known by their slogans which are unmistakably linked to each other.
Just Do It is always Nike.
The Best a Man Can Get is always Gillette.
While it’s impractical to reach that level of notoriety for most businesses, establishing your own voice is crucial.
For small to midsized businesses, blogging helps in that endeavor more than any other form of advertising. Through blogging, you can regularly push news about your company and the services and products you offer.
The types of blogs you publish will help you establish a connection with your customers. It also helps generate engagement that your business will benefit from.
As your blog grows, it becomes easier for your brand to attract traffic to your website, which ultimately leads to an increase in sales.
Think of it this way. Let’s hypothetically suppose you’re going out to buy a pair of super exclusive, limited Nikes from Footlocker. There’s a Footlocker in almost every mall, but you wouldn’t just go to the closest mall if you’re serious about buying these kicks.
You’d go to an outlet that stands out.
On the internet, you’ve got to differentiate your business to get more traffic and sales. Your blog helps your business stand out.
Take the example of the Taylor Stitch blog. Taylor Stitch is a clothing brand, and they publish regular posts about different clothing styles and interviews with style ambassadors. Through their blog, they’ve positioned themselves as style-gurus, and their blog brings them thousands of new customers every month!
2. Blogging leads to leads
Great blog posts generate leads regularly. They keep bringing in customers without having to republish the post again and again.
A blog that is interesting, relevant, and SEO optimized will trend for months or years on end. This is in direct contrast to a newspaper ad or a television ad that you have to keep paying to run on different days.
There are two types of marketing:
- Push
- Pull
Push marketing is easy to execute, but it costs a lot of money. ROI isn’t great to push marketing either.
TV ads, billboards, radio spots – any form of advertising that is unsolicited is push marketing.
On the other hand, pull marketing is a little difficult to *excuse the pun* pull off. The great thing though, is that pull marketing is great for your brand, and the ROI on it is amazing.
Blogs are great for pull marketing. Want your brand to pop up? Make sure you focus on terms that your customers are searching for.
With blog posts, you want them written in a way that your posts show up for your target audience when they search for certain keywords or titles.
Do this well and your blog will become a great tool for lead generation. Even television ads don’t have that kind of reach, after all, they only play on the slot that is paid for no matter how many people watch them.
Blogs give readers the option to share them with different social media platforms. Additionally, companies that publish blog posts tend to receive 97% more inbound links to their website than those that don’t.
At no extra cost to you, readers share blog posts to their friends and relatives. You get all this super effective pull from potential customers, and your brand gets great word of mouth because your blogs are shared by readers.
To get that reach from conventional advertising, you’d have to run your ads on several platforms, resulting in multiple payments. Blogs are far more cost-effective and penetrative when it comes to zeroing in on your target audience than antiquated television or newspaper ads.
3. Better ROI
According to the Stratabeat, websites that blog are able to get 67% more leads than those that don’t.
Great ROI happens when you give your audience what they want.
Intersperse blogs with bright and colorful images and videos, and break the content into headings and subheadings to draw in more readers.
This makes it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, which means they will stay on your blog longer than they would if the information wasn’t easy to scan and read.
It also helps your business if blogs are posted during peak hours. Publishing at the right take makes it possible for you to engage viewers during the busiest times of the day on the web and translates into more customers. Posting at different times of the day may also help you reach a new audience altogether.
Different cities and states have different sweet spots for web traffic. When blog posts are published at the right time, you can expand your sphere of influence further than you ever could with word of mouth or TV and newspaper ads.
How can you get started with blogging?
Writing Blogs Yourself – Everyone’s First Choice
This is a no-brainer. You can just write your own blog posts.
You offer unique value to your brand. The insight you can offer is hard to replicate.
There are millions of blog posts out there that regurgitate the same information over and over again. And you can’t really do much about the fact that almost every story has been told.
What you can do is change the way you tell the story.
A person that has looked at several websites for a car repair service may pause on yours if you offer them a better rate, but what will keep them coming back is a unique perspective.
If your blog simply details the services that you provide, it may be hit or miss with most visitors, but if it engages them with beautiful images and a visible dedication to the craft of repairing automobiles, you’ll reel in gear-heads.
Offering a unique perspective on a topic is crucial when trying to build a readership.
Pros
Writing blogs yourself makes it possible for you to connect with a group of potentially loyal readers. If you do this long enough, you will eventually build a Rolodex of readers that truly care about your products and services and are lifelong customers.
They have a relationship with you that transcends customer and business owner. It’s your voice they care about, and it’s why they will return to read what you have to say.
Looking at the big picture, though, there is much more than your blog can do than build an audience.
Blogging offers more value than the retention of customers that you already have.
Great blogs help you get new customers. To attract them, you’ll need more than a unique voice, you will need an expert-level understanding of the tricks of the blogging trade. You’ll need to publish loads of content. And you’ll need to continue to do so regularly.
Cons
Blogging is much harder today than it was ten or even five years ago. Today there are an estimated 505 million blogs online, and you are bound to find hundreds and thousands of content pieces targeting the same subject.
It is much harder to attract an audience today than ever before.
You will need an extensive understanding of Search Engine Optimization in order to ensure traction for your posts. Without SEO, your blog posts will never climb to the top of the Google Search results, and you don’t want to get left behind in the barren wasteland of Page 2.
The standard tools to categorize posts like “Categories”, “tags”, “Primary Keywords”, “Secondary Keywords”, etc. all need to be placed in your posts in order for it to attract the kind of traffic you want.
Writing good content takes a lot of time. If you can afford to put in the time required to think of topics to write about, write the blog posts, find images, optimize for SEO, publish the blog content, and then track results, then you should probably go ahead and manage that on your own.
Another important point to consider is that you’re probably not that great at writing. You’re most likely very talented at your own trade, but writing for an online audience requires training, experience, and feedback from editors.
Bottom line is that blogging is hard work that takes a lot of time. That’s why so many small to mid-sized businesses decide to hire blog writers to manage their blog.
Hire A Freelancer To Write For Your Blog–WTime and (Potentially) Cost-Saving
Freelancing or remote work has become a very popular career choice especially amongst millennials and Generation Z. 55 million Americans have chosen freelancing over traditional jobs according to Monster.com.
According to a survey done by FlexJobs in 2015, freelance bloggers on their site comprised of 39% Bachelor’s Degree holders, 22% college students, and 18% Master’s Degree holders.
This means that a lot of motivated and educated people are available for writing blogs. This is a pool of talent that can be put to good use.
Pros
The pros of hiring freelancers are pretty straightforward. Since you’re dealing with an individual that works on a per-project basis, you can get a good bargain. If you like the work you receive, you can hire this person regularly for rates that you’re comfortable with.
One of the best things about hiring freelancers is that you’re not making a long term commitment. You can hire them for a small project and then not continue if they start dropping the ball.
Freelance writing websites generally have a secure payment process. The way payments work is that any project payment you made is put in escrow (a lot like when you’re purchasing property). Escrow is only released when the project is completed.
There are thousands of great freelancers looking for work online. Some of them are great; however, not every freelancer is diamond in the rough.
These platforms are full of “aspiring writers” that are in way over their heads. They might make a good first impression because you don’t necessarily know where they’re getting their samples from, but that’s a chance you’ll have to take every time you hire a freelance writer.
Cons
Hiring is a tricky business. A lot of people make a great first impression, but they’re unable to deliver what you’re looking for because they lack motivation or talent.
When you hire a freelance writer, you essentially hire someone you don’t know.
Freelancers offer their service for one thing and one thing only – money. In a survey commissioned by the Freelancers Union & Elance-oDesk, 68% respondents claimed that they’re freelancing to make a little money on the side.
Unfortunately, a large number of freelancers get into the game half-heartedly. They’ve got full-time jobs doing other things, and they’re on these sites to be able to make an extra buck.
That’s great for them, but if you’re spending good money for work, then you want results that aren’t half-assed by part-time bloggers. Your business deserves better.
Freelancers work remotely, and they’re not exclusively contractually obligated to you
The best freelancers will have bigger clients that pay them more than what you’re offering. As a result, the work you require might be put on the backburner without you finding out until the eleventh hour.
Lastly, freelancers are notorious for not meeting deadlines. They’re a pain to manage, and you never know what and when they’re going to deliver.
Where to hire freelancers
Freelancing has become a huge industry in the past decade. Entire businesses have developed around connecting freelancers to clients and vice versa. There are hundreds of great freelancers with different skill sets that are sought out by thousands of different businesses.
Some of the best websites to hire freelancers are:
Hiring an Agency to Manage Your Blog – The Smart Person’s Choice
In the last decade, blog writing has become a specialized industry because so many businesses want to hire a professional team to write and manage their blog.
The benefits of blogging are insurmountable and savvy business owners want to get the best results from their business blogs. To really get the best results, you have to hire a professional team of writers, editors, SEOs, and content strategists that have a proven track record of building blogs.
Agencies like Content Development Pros employs career-oriented professionals that have an expert command of SEO. The writers on their teams want to make a career in this space. They’re not juggling between two acts, the work they deliver is fueled by passion.
Pros
Agencies are a significantly better option than freelancers because of two major reasons.
The first reason makes a world of a difference for busy business owners. Agencies have an air of professionalism about them that’s a rarity with freelancers. The second main reason is that agencies are in the for the long haul. Their employees aren’t working for extra money. A blog writing service agency’s core competency and source of income is blog writing.
You want your blog to be handled by professionals.
A blog writing and management team can and will:
- Create a long term strategy for your blog
- Recommend keywords and titles
- Handle all the blog writing
- Publish all the blog posts on your blog
- Show you results from your blog
What’s more, with an agency, you can expect proactive communication and round the clock customer service.
Blog writers that are employed by an agency receive training and feedback regularly. They’re familiar with all the latest trends and strategies. This is extremely important for your business because you want your blog to stay ahead of the competition.
One other point to consider is that agencies have a team of writers. You can choose to lock in a writer, but that strategy sucks when you want to scale up. With an agency, they’ll know what writers are best suited for your blog, and it’ll be their problem to find the perfect writers to keep up with demand, not yours.
Another factor to consider is that agencies use paid services and tools to ensure that the blogs they write are primed for readability such as:
Agencies also work hard to find topics that your readers are interested in. They use several tools like Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, and Buzzsomo to identify the best trending topics and keywords in order to drive maximum traffic to your blog.
Cons
The cons of hiring an agency over a freelancer are mainly monetary.
Agencies charge a little bit more than what most freelance bloggers do, but if you do your due diligence, you’ll learn that the best freelance bloggers charge upwards of $76/hr. Most agencies don’t charge that much.
Another big con is that there are so many agencies to choose from. Some seem great at first, but they don’t live up to your expectations.
Finding and hiring the best fit for your business is one of the biggest hurdles when it comes to hiring an agency for content writing services.
How to hire agencies
Hiring an agency is easy if you’re lucky. The type of agencies there is a range from great to very mediocre. You shouldn’t just hire the first agency you find. Do a little bit of due diligence to find the perfect fit for your business.
The first thing you need to do is follow a simple search result and you’ll get more than a few options to choose from.
Things you should consider before you hire an agency include:
- Price – How much would you pay per blog? What about monthly blog management?
- Quality – Are you going to be assigned the best writer? Do they have writers with different quality ratings?
- Service – Will you just get the writing? Can they manage your blog?
- Support – Do you get a dedicated account manager? Is their support available 24/7?
- Editing – Do they have a separate editing team? Will they check for originality and plagiarism?
Ask all of these questions before you start. More importantly, we always recommend that you check out ratings for the service provider before you choose one.
Some popular platforms to find agencies are:
Make sure you’ve asked the right questions and that you’ve checked reviews before you hire blog writers. If you are considering hiring an agency to manage your blog, we recommend you check out this link.
How many blogs do you need to make an impact?
The short answer is that the number of blogs depends on what your aim is.
The agency you hire will have extensive data on how many blogs can result in a significant uptick for your business.
At times, a single blog post can attract more users than 5 blog posts can. On the other hand, some blog posts steadily build an audience over several months. They might not go viral, but the results they get you over time can become a game-changer.
What is unarguable is the fact that regular blogging positively impacts your small business. The interest generated from regular blogging is most often much more significant than the impact you get from publishing new posts on an ad-hoc basis. After all, old blog posts still get mentions months after they’ve been published in the blog has a regular readership.
To aptly answer how many blogs you need question, you need to consider two main points.
- What are your competitors doing?
- What do you want to achieve with your blog?
Understanding your competition
The first thing you should do is analyze the competition.
Identify and try to understand what your competitors are doing. With an untrained eye, you might not necessarily fully comprehend how well your competitors are doing.
But you should try to answer these questions.
- How many of your competitors are blogging?
- How frequently are your top competitors blogging? More than once a day? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
- What’s the length of their average blog posts?
- Are they getting a lot of likes or comments on their blogs?
- How well are the blogs written? Do they have images or plain text?
Suppose one of your competitors is Arista Air. Their business provides HVAC services.
The Arista blog features regular posts about fixing heat pumps, different refrigerant fluids, getting rid of smells within your home, and other useful advice for people about HVAC maintenance.
Now if that’s your competitor, what you should do first is analyze what they’re doing well and try to answer the questions we listed before. The next thing you should do is asking the agency your considering hiring to run competitor analysis research for you.
Let them come up with a strategy and compare it with what you’re planning.
We recommend that you start off with 30 blogs at least a 1,000 words each and then scale down to 15 blogs per month if you operate in a space with “average” competition. But really, our recommendation depends on the industry and location you operate in.
Identifying and setting goals for your blog
What are you looking to get out of blogging?
Do you want to blog because you’re more interested in lead generation?
Are you blogging to improve branding on a local level? Or are competing statewide? Are you trying to get better exposure from a nationwide audience?
You need to understand what role your blog will play in your overall marketing strategy.
If you want to make SEO and inbound marketing a central part of your marketing plan then you need to blog aggressively. However, if you’re just blogging to improve branding and you’re not necessarily looking to grow your target audience quickly then you should just stick to one blog post a week.
Whatever the case might be – you need to realize that blogging isn’t about publishing the most content.
You’ve got to publish high-quality content that’s optimized for results. A dozen poorly written blog posts poorly will never outperform a couple of well-written blog posts.
Discuss your goals and objective with the agency you hire. After hearing your objectives and maybe understanding your budget, they should be able to come up with a blogging strategy for your business. Listen to what they have to say and then plan accordingly.
What Is The Best Word Count For Blog Posts?
The best ranking or performing blog posts are rarely short and sweet.
It’s a very easy mistake to start small and focus on creating short, easy to read posts. For a lot of first-time bloggers, it makes sense to start with the one-page blog posts we generally only read so little.
However, the truth is, long-form blog posts that have a lot of detail and original content rank significantly higher on search engine results than short blog posts.
You’ll also notice that longer blog posts are shared more often. And if you check the comments section on blog posts, you’ll see that longer posts generally have more user comments than shorter blog posts.
Really short blog posts (300 to 500 words) are great if you need to make an announcement or share a quick thought with your readers. These posts don’t ever attract a large audience through Google or other search engines, though.
Long-form blog posts (800 words to 4,000 words) are great if you need to offer lots of valuable information. According to a study by Backlinko, the average length of the posts on Page 1 of Google’s Search Results is 1,900 words.
Some experts are of the opinion that focusing on word count is stupid. Once you’ve established a solid presence online, you can stop caring so much about the word count. However, in the early stages, we recommend that you focus on creating high-quality long-form blog posts.
Whatever length you go with, understand that the primary focus should be to offer great value in the content you’re publishing. You’ll only get the results you want if you focus on regularly publishing high-quality content. The length of it could vary depending on the topic you’re writing on.
Let Content Development Pros build your audience
As you may have surmised from this blog post on the importance of blogging for your business, creating and maintaining a blog that effectively attracts, educates, and entertains a large audience isn’t easy. Millions of blogs die each year because they can’t implement winning strategies or because they fail to understand their target market.
Consider hiring Content Development Pros for your blog.
We’ve got a large team of expert writers that have experience writing for and managing blogs from 75 different industries. Our pricing is extremely fair and the service you get is amazing.
