Does Your Business Need a Blog? 3 Ways to Find Out

Have you been contemplating adding a blog to your online marketing strategy? Or do you have a blog and wonder if you should invest in it more? If so, then there are a couple of ways to determine whether a business blog is right for your business. In this post, we’ll look at the ways to do it.

1. Look at your competitor’s websites.

Competitor research can usually answer any questions you might have about whether you should implement a specific online marketing strategy into the mix. Visit the websites of at least ten of your competitors and see if they are running blogs. Usually you can find them by looking in their header or footer menu, or doing a Google search for your competitor’s name plus the word blog.

If you find that your competitors not only have blogs, but also that their blogs are successful in terms of generating social engagement and commentary, those are good signs that customers in your industry may expect you to have a blog too.

2. Find out if people are blogging about your industry.

Let’s say that you don’t have a lot of competitors, or that you find your competitors are not blogging. That doesn’t necessary mean you should blog. That just means you need to see if there is interest out there for a blog in your industry.

Alltop is a great place to start for this research. There, you will find blogs about every topic imaginable from A to Z. In addition to getting a link to blogs on specific topics, you will get to see a portion of the titles from the latest five blog posts.

You can also use more advanced, premium tools, like BuzzSumo, to find out if blog posts about your industry are engaging. Their Pro tool offers a 14 day free trial, which is just enough time to look up keywords in your industry to see the most socially-engaged blog posts about it.

3. Determine if you have unmet online marketing needs.

Do you feel like your online marketing strategy is simply missing something? That something is likely content. When you blog, you create content that can help you boost your effectiveness in other areas, such as the following.

• Blogging can give you content to share with your social media audience, thus keeping your social profiles up to date.
• Blogging can give you content to share with your email list other than marketing or advertisements.
• Blogging can give you more pages on your website to help you rank for specific keywords beyond those that you use for your main website pages.
• Blogging can give you a place to send visitors on your website besides your product or sales pages, helping them to naturally convert into customers.

In other words, blogging can be the thing that helps you make your social media, email marketing, search engine, and conversion marketing tactics more successful.

In Conclusion

If you know your competitors are blogging, know that blog posts in your industry get strong social traction, and know that you need content to help with other areas in your online marketing, then you will know you need a blog for your business. Think about these things today and get started on your own business blog!