While blogging started out as a way for people to share recipes, tricks, tips, and more, it has turned into for a way for companies to market their products. Companies can now share their expertise and establish their business as a leader, increase their ranking on Google, gain followers, and connect people to a brand.

How Do Businesses Gain Customers through Blogging?

It might seem counterintuitive to share your expertise in hopes of getting a customer down the line. So let me share an example to demonstrate. Let’s say I am wondering if my car battery is still good or needs to be replaced? I look online and search for information on car batteries. I find an article posted by a mechanic on diagnosing whether a battery is still good. Through this post, I discover that my battery does need to be replaced and I find another post on his blog about how to safely replace it. I start to follow his blog for future help with my car.

Later on, when something more complicated goes wrong with my car, I decide it is too much time and effort to try to fix myself. I remember how reliable, trustworthy, and knowledgeable that mechanic’s blog was and call him to fix my car. The mechanic gave away the info on how to detect and replace a bad battery, but in the end, made a customer for life.

Now that we understand the benefits of blogging, you need to ask yourself if it is right for your company? Just because blogging is a great and fairly inexpensive marketing tool, does not mean it makes sense for every company to have a blog.

What is your Goal for Blogging?

Although there is the added benefit of gaining customers through blogging if that is your only goal in writing it might not be a good fit. Readers will follow you because of your expertise and passion. If every post stops short of being really helpful or focuses mostly on why they should hire you, they may feel you are being disingenuous and not return to your blog. They want to feel like you are there to share your wealth of knowledge and not just make more money.

It’s okay to promote your business or services, people know you need to make money. But if the posts aren’t genuinely helpful, offered without reservation, and free of unexplained technical jargon, people won’t appreciate them and feel a sense of loyalty to you.

How Often do you Plan on Writing?

Blogging is something that needs to be done frequently. You need to be able to commit to at least one article a week in order to gain a good following. Do you realistically have the time to write? If you are only writing sporadically, then maybe you need to find alternatives to blogging. Now I am not saying if you cannot post at least once a week then do not blog, but the frequency of posts is something you definitely want to consider when starting a blog. If it’s less than once a month, it may not be any better than not posting at all.

Do you Feel Comfortable with Writing?

You need to be honest with yourself when asking these questions. If you absolutely hate writing and will be the one to have to write the majority of the articles, then maybe this is not right for you.

Obviously, the point of this article is not to dissuade you, but to get you thinking if blogging is realistic for your business. The benefits of regularly posting on a blog are tremendous, but as small business owners so our to-do lists.