Blogger Schools

For all the benefits of marketing through a professionally-written blog – including the customer retention and search engine optimization benefits – it’s a wonder that more businesses don’t use them. For a long time, the issue confused me; after all, it’s so much cheaper than pay-per-click, expensive web redesigns, or annoying e-mail campaigns that you’d think marketers and self-employed professionals would be tripping over themselves to get their blogs noticed.

And then I remembered something that my clients mention to me every once in a while: most people don’t enjoy writing very much.

In fact, they’ll do almost anything to get out of having to conquer a blank page. For many, the reluctance to sit in front of a keyboard is a carryover from their school days; they didn’t like doing homework then, and so they’re not about to start doing it again now, years later. For others, it’s a matter of time or confidence; they think they’re not any good at writing, or that putting new articles together will take too long.

I understand these concerns. While most people tend to be better writers than they think, that truth is that not all of us have the patience or free time to assemble publishable material. Others just flat out hate it. And really, that’s the thing – and really, the only thing – that makes blog marketing difficult. To succeed at it, you have to sit down, think of a few interesting topics, and then put words on the page every week, if not more often.

To get that done requires an investment of time or money. To make matters even worse, marketing through your blog isn’t something that’s likely to work or show a return overnight – it usually takes at least a few months for people (and search engines) to really catch on.

So why do it in the first place? Why bother even posting to a blog? Well, if you’re a business owner, marketer, or self-employed person, then the answer is that, despite all the hassles, blog marketing remains one of the very best ways to get your site discovered. The Internet remains largely driven by content, and there’s simply no substitute for having original, well-written articles that appeal to readers and search engine spiders alike. You have to have writing if you want to be found, and you have to have good writing if you want to sell anything.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you blog marketing is easy – it isn’t. But if you can manage to sit down and write interesting articles every week, or get a professional to do it for you, you’ll soon find that it’s one of the most cost effective ways to boost your bottom line.