It’s well known that blogs can be great for Google, great for driving your Social Media presence and a fantastic way to boost credibility and engage with your audience, but ever realised they can be just as useful offline?
It’s well known that blogs can be great for Google, great for driving your Social Media presence and a fantastic way to boost credibility and engage with your audience, but ever realised they can be just as useful offline?
Having blogged for over two years, we’ve found our blog had done the following for us online:
So that’s online, how about offline?
When we started blogging, we focused on the online benefits, and didn’t even consider its wider use, which in reality our blog has helped more offline than online.
Knowledge base
If someone asks us a question once, they’ll probably ask it again, and even ask Google the same question. We started by writing short articles based on what our customers asked us. In time, we found ourselves adding links in emails to articles that offered more information and often printing blog content for customers to read.
In short, it’s saved a whole lot of typing, added additional advice to a subject and saved us a lot of time.
We’ve ended up with a small knowledge based to refer to that covers everything from Distance Selling Regulations, to Facebook, PCI/DSS compliance, Google+, Web hosting and so much more.
Most companies dream of having such a library of knowledge and resource at hand to save time and refer to as did we. The blog helped us focus on that and achieve it.
A sales tool
We all like the idea of seeing a prospective customer with not only a Proposal, but a pack of useful credibility building information. Since writing a blog, we’ve now got that, and quite often we’ll add blog content to Proposals to better demonstrate our knowledge and empower our prospective clients with honest and impartial advice.
Staff Training
New member of staff? Need to spend time training them and helping them understand what your business offers and how your business sees the world?
We all have that challenge, however one of the biggest benefits we’ve seen is using our own blog material to educate our own staff. All the knowledge is there in your blog, so why not use it?
The Newsletter
If you’re reading this, you might well have just come from our newsletter.
Newsletters are a fantastic way to reach your existing customers and contacts and keep in touch.
The problem with newsletters is, they can take time, thought and often end up being “just another thing we know we should be doing, we just don’t get time”. The fact is; if you’ve written a few blog articles already, you’ve already written your newsletter!
Suddenly that task that you know you ought to be doing, but have been putting off, isn’t so daunting any more and you reap the rewards of having a newsletter.
Focuses your marketing
Sounds silly, but having a blog forces you to sit down, think about what you’re writing, why you’re writing, and who you’re writing to. Just the simple fact of taking regular breaks to stop and think, makes a huge difference. It helps to overcome the hurdle most business owners have of not being able to work on their business as they’re business working in their business.
Blogging is a small step, but with a big return if you put the time in.
