I spend lot’s of time each week advising our clients that they should have a blog on their website and write regular blogs (or get us to write regular blogs for them).
Why would a business owner want to write a blog?
- To gain more search engine visibility – so that their business shows up on Google when potential customers search. Therefore, more people will find them and hopefully buy from them!
- If Google searchers spend time reading the blog and are persuaded to look at further articles or pages within the website then it’s overall Google profile will be raised. Google thinks the website must be a useful resource because people are spending time on it and not instantly clicking away. Again this, in turn, means that more people find the business and hopefully buy from it!
- A bank of well-written articles that provide FREE advice and help will give the business credibility with potential customers. It will demonstrate the business’s expertise. And … you guessed it … more customers will find the business and hopefully buy from it!
- We all get asked the same questions over and over again by our customers or potential customers. Writing blogs that answer these questions will save us and our customers time – just point the customer at the relevant blog.
What’s the problem?
Why wouldn’t a business owner want to write a blog?
- Keeping an active blog takes a lot of work, time and/or money to do.
- Writing is difficult for lots of us … we worry that we’re not good enough at it and will look stupid if we get it a bit wrong.
- We at Pavoni haven’t been writing regular blogs for our own business so how can we expect our customers to believe it’s really a valuable use of their time? We can’t! The excuse we’ve used is that we don’t need to blog because we already get enough new business through other means … referrals from existing customers, new work from existing customers, new clients from the networking that naturally occurs as part of life (going to the pub!) as well as organised business networking events.
- This excuse is true BUT it means we are doing our customers a disservice. How can we truly help them with blogging when we don’t do it for ourselves? We know how to write blogs and create visual content – but because we don’t actually create them for ourselves – we don’t have the ongoing pressure of thinking about what to write and the pressure of finding the time to do it in our busy lives.
Well, that is going to change today.
I’ve decided to commit to creating a blog for the Pavoni website every week throughout October, November and December 2017 – that’s 13 weeks and 13 blogs to write (this one counts as the 1st) I’ve only just made it for week one as its the 7th of October already!
I like a challenge … and I think weekly makes it hard enough but still manageable. Admittedly – these are not going to be blogs written by our professional copywriter Anne – so please excuse any grammatical errors and excessive wordiness.
Will I succeed with this challenge?
To be honest – I’m not sure but I’m going to give it a go. I’m on day 280 of my “Birds of a Feather” year-long challenge which gives me confidence that once I commit to something publicly – I will do it. (More on that later). I’m going to have to put into practice the well-known phrase: “Done is better than perfect!”
How am I going to make this work?
Well, I’m going to have to ‘not do’ other things that I would normally have done in the time I’m now spending blogging. Like most people – it’s not like I’m sitting around twiddling my thumbs with lots of spare time each day! So today – what am I ‘not doing’ so that I have time to create this blog? Here’s the list so far:
- Sending a quote to a client (it will have to wait until this next week)
- Preparing for a meeting on Monday (I’m going to have to put a couple of hours in on Sunday for that)
- Installing an SSL security certificate on the Pavoni website (This will have to wait too)
This weeks’ blog
Blog number one of this challenge is the announcement and initial planning. I’ve created the mind-map at the top of this blog post as a plan of action for the weeks ahead. It has highlighted the areas I need to think more about and also crystallised the purpose in my mind.
What is that purpose?
The core purpose of our blog is to share information and ideas to help businesses attract the customers or clients they want. We also plan to do some primary research into what makes certain things such as colours and website designs appealing ‘or not’ to people.
Oh, and I always advise people that they should put a call to action at the end of their blogs – so here it is:
If you have ideas for topics you’d like us to write about or research then please email them to me: Sarah at studio@pavonicreative.co.uk or post them in the comment box below.
Leave a comment