Damn, you mean I have to blog, too?

Boost your Business by Busily Blogging, Buddy!

by Patrick Lemieux

You keep hearing it, everywhere you go. Blog this and blog that. You are surrounded by people so fired up about their blog, that is all they can talk about; how they just love to sit down and blog blog blog, all night long about how great their business is and what they are doing.

You often say in response that you have a website and that it does a good job generating leads so you don’t need to blog. You think to yourself, “I’m not a writer, what would I even write about” and “I don’t have time for this” and finally “I have a website, isn’t that enough?”

No it isn’t.

The truth is, you do need a blog….you needed one three years ago, and now you need it even more.

I’m glad you have a website. I’m also glad that it does a good job collecting names for you from people who want quotes or have questions. Really, that is a good thing.

But just having a website is like being that person at the party, standing awkwardly in the corner of the room (sweating because you wore a sweater and it is like, 90 degrees in the place), and hoping someone will come up to you and start talking.

Who you want to be is the person interjecting themselves into the conversations because you have something insightful, interesting or funny to contribute. That is what your blog can do for you.

There are a lot of very good reasons to start a blog. Some are as follows:

• It helps provide you and your business a place to showcase new work you are doing, services you offer, and knowledge you obtain.

• It gives you a place to highlight all the cool things your company is doing.

• It helps with your PageRank on Google (which is important).

• It gives you constant new material to push out onto your social media.

• It can expose you to new potential clients.

• It is a great way to increase the people subscribing to your email newsletters.

• It gives you another place to put up expensive advertising you bought….sigh.

• It gives you a way to reach out to people with surveys to get more information about what customers want from you.

• It is a place to have fun (if you work for a company that likes to have fun).

There are literally a million Top 10 reasons to have a business blog, so if my list isn’t good enough, just Google it.

Blogging is a way to continue to deliver fresh content and generate leads with that content. It is textbook inbound. People have questions, you have answers….so write about it and put it on the internet.

Not a great writer? Get someone who is.  Hire a company, find someone local, figure it out, but start doing it and start doing it this quarter, before summer is over and the tourists have gone home.

Don’t think you have the time to write? I assure you that you do. I had to sit down four times to finish this blog. I did a little one evening and some last week early in the morning. I even wrote a few notes on my phone one day while waiting for a meeting. Blogging doesn’t need to take forever (although do allow time for proofreading).

There are plenty of companies that are doing a good job with blogging right now. Dream Local Digital (the nice folks who let me rant here) do a pretty good job. Also Ross Lasley is doing  a nice job on Twitter with this (the guy bleeds Hubspot and that is cool) and Nathan O’Leary does a great job on his as well. Kristi is one of the first Maine bloggers that I thought was just totally kicking ass with her blog.

Want a Maine company doing a great business with their blog, check out the Sugarloaf2020 blog or the LiveMaine Tumblr (notice they aren’t ever really writing).

So please start blogging for your company. If you don’t, your competition will soon, and then it might be too late.

If you want to work with professional writers and marketing strategists who know how to get good content written and read, contact Dream Local Digital. We can’t wait to collaborate on your blog.

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