Why you should begin blog writing as early as possible

One of the responses we receive from many of our startup customers is to reach out to them at a later date, as they are currently not ready to invest in their blogging journey. Companies in spaces such as Software as a Service (SaaS), product manufacturing etc., put off their blog writing efforts until they are satisfied for release with the service or product they provide. 

This is understandable, as in many organisations (particularly start-ups) focus on product development is an absolute priority to ensure a smooth route to market and satisfying new customers to create a strong brand reputation. This causes many organisations to postpone their blog writing until they have launched their product or service. Once launched, we typically receive a note from these businesses ready to set up a blog writing subscription. 

This brings to question, is there an optimal time to begin blogging? Gary Vaynerchuk of Vaynermedia openly talks about his theory that every company is a media company, so, in this blog, we will look at why you should begin your blogging early.

Drive Traffic to Your Site With Blog Writing

If you don’t blog until after you launch your product, your website is essentially a bare-bones website that only contains product information, an about section, maybe a team section and some other fairly standard information. Pre Launch pages are often used in SaaS companies to register interest and for updates. 

So how do you drive traffic to your website prior to your product launching? Think about how many pages there are on your website. Not a lot, right? (hopefully or the User Experience may not be great) And how often do you update those pages? Again this isn’t a regular thing (How often can you really update your About Us page?)

These problems can be lessened by beginning your blog early on. Every time a blog post is published is an additional indexed page on the site, this translates to one more opportunity for your site to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in organic search. SEO is covered in our next point, but generally more site activity = better google rank. More on that later. 

Blogging is great because it integrates with social media. Each time you write a blog post, you create content that can shared on social networks — Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit,  Quora — which helps expose your business to a new audience that may not know you yet. It can also maintain social media presence  — as opposed to tasking social media managers to develop brand new original content for social media campaigns (or creating content yourself), your blog can serve as that repository of content. 

So, the first benefit of blogging early? It helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that.

SEO Blog Writing takes time, Think Long Term

Despite what many people perceive, the dark art of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) takes time to realise its benefits. The average time it takes for a new blog to get traction in the search engines is around 3 to 6 months. This is assuming that the content is published consistently and is of high quality, as well as building backlinks to those articles. If you are a new site, this could take up to a year before you start to rank in Google.

Let’s go through an example, say you write and publish a blog post today. Your statistics may be as follows; on publishing the blog post you get 200 views and 20 leads, and the following day you get another 100 views and 10 leads as it spreads on social media and some subscribers get caught up on their email and RSS. However, after a couple of days, most of the fanfare from that post dies down and you’ve netted 300 views and 30 leads. The blog is certainly not finished. 

That blog post is now ranking in search engines. This means that for days, weeks, months, and years to come, you will cumulatively gain traffic and leads from that blog post. The image below from Hubspot demonstrates this well:

Establish Authority and Become a Thought Leader With Your Blog Posts

The most successful blogs answer what their target audience and prospective customers are asking. If your blog creates content consistently that provides value to the target audience you will become authoritative and even a thought leader. This makes selling your product and services easier as the customer is able to gain an insight into your organisational mind.

Imagine the impact of sending an informative blog post you wrote to help a confused customer? Or how many more sales you could close if leads discovered blog content written by your team?

This is a bit more subjective than what we’ve previously discussed, where we are talking leads and traffic. However, blog posts act as a way to warm up even the coldest leads. Let’s go through a number of ways it can do this:

• If your target audience and prospects find answers to their common questions via blog posts written by your company, there is a much higher likelihood that they will undertake the sales journey as you’ve provided them value previously – even before they didn’t want to buy anything. 
• It creates a line for communication, prospective customers will have more context about your company, the industry you operate within and your products or services. This creates a good starting point for the sales conversation and means leads are often more likely to convert as they feel familiar with your business. 
• If you receive frequently asked questions (FAQs) you can write blogs to answer the most common questions. This can act as an archive of blog posts, which is efficient as it can be used to point customers towards, and your team becomes a helpful resource to their prospect.

So don’t wait till your product launches until you begin your blogging journey, it takes time for a blog to provide real value, so the sooner you do it the better.

Want to put your blog writing onto autopilot? Head over to https://blogwritingservicesuk.com/ to find out more how we can help scale your business with blog writing.