17 Reasons Your Website Needs a Blog
Do I need a blog?
If you’re a fashion, beauty or lifestyle website owner and you’ve been asking yourself this question recently, the answer is most likely – yes.
There are plenty of reasons why you might not want to get started on a blog. I call them reasons but really, are they just excuses?
If you’ve ever thought about adding a blog to your website but said any of the below to yourself, hands up.
But if these are your reasons for NOT starting a blog – these pointers about why your website DOES need a blog may well quickly change your mind.
These are my top 17 reasons why your website needs a blog in 2020.
And they are not the only ones!
You Need a Blog For SEO
Let’s start with the one that could be the most important but the one that tends to confuse non-marketers and even put them off.
Adding an active – and the most important word here is ‘active’ – blog to your site really can boost your SEO strategy.
The future of SEO changes all the time but what could be classed as an undeniable trend is the need for rich, long-form, relevant and high-quality content.
A blog gives you a relevant way to consistently add fresh content to your site which not only gives your visitors plenty to get their teeth into but also -
Did you know that websites with active blogs have 434% more indexed pages?
Add rich, high-quality, keyword-injected and relevant blog content to your site every week through the power of a blog.
A Blog Gives You a Rich Library of Content for Social Media
Lining up decent content for social media can feel like a drag. You’ve got some product images, some nice lifestyle images and even some relevant quotes you think your customers will appreciate. But you need the chat to back it up. Having rich, relevant and original fashion blog content gives you this. And plenty of it.
Posting your own original content to your social media also serves you up with a much higher chance of being reposted, forwarded or just generally engaged with. 👍
And think of it likes this – Every time you post your blog somewhere online, it just drives engaged traffic back to your website. And isn’t that what we’re all looking for?
Evergreen blog content can be reused and repurposed over and over throughout the year and it gives you a rich resource to come back to time and time again.
You can also recreate blog posts for each channel and even turn them into videos for YouTube. That’s how one blog idea can turn into multiple blog posts, multiple social media posts, a YouTube video and pretty much anything else you can think of!
It Increases Your Traffic
As your blog works for SEO and gives you exciting social media content, it increases your traffic.
While you’re promoting your blog posts on social media and gaining clicks through to your site that way, your SEO will start to work in the background. As everyone knows, SEO is a long slog. But you have to start somewhere if you want to build consistent traffic from organic search results.
Blog Content Can Help You Get to Know Your Customers
Once you’ve started to build up blog content, analysing which pieces of content your customers engage with the most and keeps them on the page for the longest will let you know what they’re most interested in.
This is actually an incredibly valuable thing to learn about your clients and will help you to produce better, more relevant and more engaging content moving forward.
Content marketing is lots of trial and error. So, use the resources you have to constantly check back and see which posts work best. Then make more like this and less like the ones that don’t do as well. And that’s pretty much marketing 101 in a concept.
Your Blog Can Help Your Customers Make Decisions
Anything on your website that can encourage and help your customers to make purchase decisions is valuable.
It allows them to further investigate products and services without feeling like they’re being overly sold-to. It also allows them to research the products they’re interested in on your website, which gives you more credibility and helps to gain their trust.
Whether you have one fantastic product or service or a whole list of incredible things on offer, start writing about them. Start indulging in the pros and amazing USPs of what you’re offering and create keyword-rich pieces of content that sell your product in an authentic way. Zero sales-spiel.
A Blog Helps to Humanise Your Brand
I’ve recently been talking on the blog and over onLinkedIn about brand voice and the importance of creating a tone of voice for your brand.
Your fashion or lifestyle blog content is a great way to humanise your brand and show off your tone of voice. It’s basically like showing off your personality to potential customers, digitally.
Although you will talk about your products or services lots on your brand’s blog, you also have the freedom to be more fun. You can look into interesting things away from your more business-focused pages and that’s where you can cross over interests with your customers and start to make them a fan.
It Creates Brand Awareness
Whatever niche your business fits into, there will be news and popular topics that everyone is talking about. From fashion trends to beauty industry insights, adding your voice to the mix through your blog is a great way to create brand awareness.
Creating interesting, informational, knowledge-packed or even entertaining blog content and posting to your social media pages is one of the best ways to create brand awareness for your business.
A Blog Positions You as An Expert
Pretty confident that you know a hell of a lot more about your niche/product/service/industry than plenty of your competitors?
Well, how would your customers know that?
Say they land on your site from a social media ad. You have a short About Us page that you scribbled down over a year ago and then your product pages.
– How do they know what you’re all about? How do they know what you know?
Answer is – they don’t.
If they can click over onto your blog page and see a library of informative blog posts that literally showcase how much you know/ how much style you have/ who uses your product/ why they need your product etc. then you’re asserting yourself as an expert.
And you’re doing it on your own terms.
Through your blog, you can show off your knowledge and gain industry credibility. You can also show off your products or services to your customers in a more casual way that lets them relate to you as a brand.
Through your blog, you can become a source of knowledge builds trust between you and your customers and gets them coming back time and time again.
It Answers the Questions Your Customers Are Asking
If you’ve done your research when it comes to lifestyle, beauty or fashion blog topics, your blog should be a wealth of information, entertainment and knowledge for your customers.
When they come to your site, they can find a blog post that answers their questions, making them bond with your brand, trust in your expertise and become more likely to join your gang as a customer of your product or service.
You can give them answers without selling – AKA, value.
Plus, lots of customers will ask these questions directly into Google. Having blogs based around the main pain points and questions that your customers have can help to get you more traffic through organic search results.
Find yourself getting lots of questions about a similar thing? Write a blog post about it!
Your Customers Like to Read Blogs
According to 99Firms,77% of internet users read blog posts regularly.
If your customers are spending time online reading blog posts on other websites, why not bring them over your site?
Give them something valuable, informative or entertaining to read and let them get to know your brand. They may well turn into your next customer.
You’re More Likely to See Positive Results From your Marketing Strategy
According to Optinmonster, marketers are 13x more likely to see positive ROI on their strategy if they focus their efforts on blogging.
Fancy getting thirteen times better results from your marketing efforts?
Yes, same.
Blogging requires the investment of time and/or money but it’s something that yields positive results long-term working alongside any paid advertising your brand is doing. It’s proven.
A Blog Is a Low Investment Marketing Tactic
When it comes down to marketing for small businesses, budget is one of the first and major concerns. You don’t have an endless budget to compete with the big businesses and you need to carefully pick and choose where to lay your efforts.
This is where the blogging strategy differs from pretty much every other marketing technique.
Whether you’re taking the time to create the content yourself or outsourcing to a freelance writer, the budget for blog content isn’t going to break the bank. Especially when you compare this sort of investment with the likes of Google AdWords and Facebook and Instagram Ads.
Blog Content Connects with More Than Customers
Becoming an authority on your topics through your blog not only connects you with your potential customers but also other experts and professionals in your niche which can open other doors for your brand.
You never know who will end up reading your blogs. And this might include anything from savvy PR opportunities or journalists to potential collaborators.
A Blog Can Help Get Backlinks to Your Site
Once you’ve started showing off your knowledge through your blog, people can use you as a resource and link back to your site which helps gain traffic and is crucial for SEO.
Backlinks are hard to achieve. Everyone knows it and everyone in marketing knows the struggle of starting from scratch when it comes to backlink strategies. Gone are the days of paying for 50 backlinks. These tactics don’t work anymore. Basically, Google is too clever for that.
While a thorough backlink strategy might be out of your budget or time restraints at the moment, producing and publishing great blog content is a hot tactic to get your site linked by relevant and high-quality authority sites. Crucial for SEO.
It Gives You a Way to Engage with Your Customers Outside of Social Media
If you don’t have a fashion or beauty blog, most likely, the only way you’re engaging with customers/visitors before (and after) they purchase from you is on social media.
A blog lets them comment and allows you to get into conversations with your web visitors.
It also gives you a space to test things, experiment with different topics, ask questions and ask for feedback from your readers. Use your own blog as a platform for real, authentic engagement with your fans.
A Blog Makes Sure You’re in Full Control of Your Content
Social media is necessary for today’s digital climate.
But have you ever thought about what would happen if you suddenly lost your channel?
With a blog that you own, you are in full control of your content – it can’t just disappear! You also get the chance to publish branded content and be in complete control over formatting and visuals like no other platform.
Customers Don’t Love Ads
According to 99Firms, 70-80% of users ignore paid ads and only focus on organic content.
If you think about that statistic, it’s pretty clear that creating organic, relevant and high-quality content to work in the background to get you to the top of SERPs results is crucial for every marketing strategy.
If you’ve gone through all the reasons your website could do with a blog and you’ve decided that now is the time, LC can help. Taking the planning, strategy, writing, optimising and publishing off your hands, opt for a full blog management service or simply get sent ready-to-roll blogs for you to self-publish.
Take a look at the Lifestyle Copywriting blog management service and let me know if you have any questions at kate@lifestylecopywriting.co.uk.
If you want to start with brand voice guidelines to get the tone of your blog just right, that’s also something that LC can help with.
Just drop me a message or email.
Until next time…
