For the Health of Your Business, Blog!
If you are like most of my clients, your day is consumed by emails, phone calls, meetings, putting out fires, and, well, just trying to get through the day without anything blowing up. Marketing is always on your mind, but it is done in bursts - on the weekend, at midnight, in the carpool line, pretty much any time you can just squeeze it in. You know that you would like to spend at least an hour a day concentrating on building your brand and in return, your business, but that just isn't always possible. Life is hard, and owning your own business is life is hard times 2.
You could devote your time to any number of good marketing strategies - social media, CRM maintenance, drip campaigns, the list goes on. There are hundreds of them. One, though, is greatly overlooked and yet can really help kill a number of birds with just the one stone.
Blogging is effective for a number of reasons. The problem is - it takes time! Don't be discouraged, though. It isn't necessary to write a blog every single day or even every week. Once a month will do. The key is consistency. Every time you publish a new blog post to your site, it gives you great shareable content. You can post your blog to all your social media platforms and really corner yourself as an expert in your market.
Even better, it will increase your Google rankings. Google works a little different than it did in the past. Now, your rankings are based on your content. As in, if your website appears to offer great content and is updated often, it will move up in the rankings. Google "crawls" over websites about every month - as long as you keep adding new content, it will continue to move you up. Also, think about this - 99% of websites are just stock copy and images and people rarely update them with new content. If you, on the other hand, regularly update your site, you will appear superior to these static sites.
A lot of people feel stuck when they think about blogging because they think they don't have anything to say. They are wrong! You aren't looking to write a thesis here. Talk about topics of interest to your industry. If you are in real estate, talk about buying a home, things to avoid when selling a home, the current market, an interesting story that happened to you that week, etc. You have a ton to talk about if you think about blogging as a conversation.
And, of course, when in doubt you can always hire someone to write for you. Typically, you will be looking at about $30 per blog post. Find someone familiar with your industry, shell out a few dollars, and move it on up!