Blogging can do amazing things for a business. But it’s not a fast way to find more clients or customers.
Blogging is very effective at:
- Building relationships with potential customers
- Boosting the SEO performance of your website
- Demonstrating your expertise
- Reminding people that you exist
- Proving that your business is a going concern…
But all this stuff takes time.
If you want overnight success, don’t bother with blogging
Faster results can be had with other marketing tactics, such as:
- Adwords
- Advertising
- Direct mail
- Email marketing
But these tactics will probably cost you more money than blogging.
And these tactics are great when you’re paying, but as soon as you turn off the cash tap, the benefits usually stop. You don’t get much residual benefit from an Adwords campaign. And while a few people might remember seeing your banner ad – or hearing your spot on the radio – as soon as you’re offline, the trickle of traffic comes to a standstill.
Blogging pays off over time
Getting a blog is like getting a dog. It’s a commitment. And you have to be prepared to care for the thing before you get one.
But if you do get a blog, and you care for it, and maintain it, and devote a little time to it every month, then it will flourish, and support you.
If you invest in your blog it will repay your efforts with new customers, more business and a greater awareness of your organisation.
I’m not sure that fast vs slow is the most useful way to look at it. Instead I would distinguish traffic strategies from conversion strategies.
Blogging – just on its own – is not really a traffic strategy at all.
It’s all about conversion. Great blog posts establish rapport, trust, and authority with readers.. they help build the relationship that makes people more comfortable to buy. Where this kind of content really comes into its own is when you have potential customers in that “doing their homework” phase of a planned purchase.
When people talk about blogging as a traffic strategy, what they usually mean is blogging + something else. That something else might be blogger outreach, a social media campaign, PR, or good old fashioned linkbuilding. It’s when you add the second ingredient that the traffic arrives. Outreach strategies primarily intended to boost organic search visibility can be a bit slow to build momentum but those primarily intended to get referral traffic can work within days.
I’ve seen blogging have a very strong role as part of a broader strategy to get new customers fast. If somebody wants to get new customers within a matter of weeks, they could do a lot worse than to write some really excellent feature content, then follow it up with a traffic strategy that can be highly targeted and implemented fast, like Adwords or a publicity campaign.
Comment by James Mawson — April 8, 2016 @ 3:47 am