Should I blog?

Happy new year, everyone! Making any new year’s resolutions? Wondering if your business could benefit from a resolution for you to start blogging? Here’s a few questions to ask yourself.

Can I write once a week?

If you can’t blog at least once a week, don’t bother. One thing worse than no blog at all is a blog that hasn’t been updated in months. After all, if the last blog entry someone sees is six months old, how do they even know your business is still around?

Keep in mind that you can write several blog entries at once, then schedule them to be published once a week, or more often even.

Do I have something interesting to say?

You can write every day for a whole year, but if you aren’t interesting to your current and potential customers, there’s not much point. The ultimate point is to keep current customers and/or get new ones. So if they aren’t interested, don’t bother.

Can I stick with it with no encouragement whatsoever?

So you’re writing once a week and have some interesting things to say. But you’re getting no feedback. No one is posting comments, no one is emailing you to tell you they loved your latest blog post.

Cry me a river.

The general rule of thumb is that 1% of visitors to a website will be an active participant in some way. So you may have 99 readers, but no one is commenting. You may have 99 readers, but no one is telling you that they loved your great blog post. Just because you’re not getting many comments does not mean you should stop posting.

And when you do get that first comment or first email, celebrate! That means there are probably 99 other people thouroughly enjoying your blog posts that just haven’t bothered to tell you so.

So if you can write something interesting at least once a week and stick with it, you should be blogging for your business! It will allow your website visitors to feel like they know you, making them that much more likely to do business with you.