Content marketing can be expensive. Where big companies can invest their dollars in such operations – the potential return is worth the not-so-small investment to hire agencies and content marketers – startups need to act smart. Which means – in this case – to have a blog.
Here’s a list of 12 reasons for startup entrepreneurs to have a blog!
It’s as good for B2B as it’s good for B2C. And it is good. Case studies have proven that blog posts are perceived as up to ten times more trustworthy than normal website posts! Moreover, we can do more with them, tell more, show more. We can make them entertaining. The possibilities are limitless here.
Furthermore, it’s getting more and more popular each day. People strive for information. If we are knowledgeable enough to start a business, we should also be knowledgeable enough to write a blog. Soon, people will start coming to us, seeking our quality insights: insights they believe that bloggers can provide (while withholding their trust in other media channels).
No one is going to become an influencer overnight – that much is obvious. It is no coincidence that there are so many bloggers on the lists of influencers, though, as having a blog can help us in becoming one faster than a dozen of other means. And when it comes to being an influencer, there’s no better thing that can happen to our startup. Becoming an influencer, we’re literally winning the crowd – and thus, we are winning the market.
I am aware that not every entrepreneur needs this kind of B2B/B2C connection. Those who need, however, will find no better mean to achieve it than through their startup’s blog. In blog posts, should we wish to, we can hit much more personal tone. Which, when it comes to building lasting relations, works surprisingly good, and sometimes it can work wonders.
Though most startup owners can’t afford to launch a professional content marketing operation, most of them don’t need to. For most, launching a blog is an optimal replacement solution for launching a content marketing operation. What startup owners need is to keep in touch with their audience: to keep it informed and to listen to the feedback it provides. What most of them doesn’t need, though, at least not in the initial phase of their entrepreneurial endeavor, is what content marketing is about. It’s all about the scope here. Lead generation and brand positioning can be useful, but let’s be honest: startups are more about establishing or finding a niche or making changes to our business profile rather than about these things.
Blogging and content marketing: these two things have a lot in common. Both can influence our clients’ decision-making process. Both can fulfill their need for more information and both can position our brand as a leader in the market. What’s more, both can allow us to avoid the problems we know the traditional advertising has when it comes to consumers’ trust and advertisement awareness.
Besides, both bloggers and content marketers have no problem with native advertising. It’s almost like if this technique was invented precisely for them to extend their already unbelievable reach.
Being part of a blogger community is not only about B2B and B2C. It’s also about the community itself, and there are many benefits of being part of it: from almost instant help and feedback from other users (WordPress’ community exceeds in this) to the possibility of furthering our reach indefinitely (bloggers reach is usually wider than content marketers’ – that’s the reason the later so often refer to the former when it comes to spreading content: content marketers simply need bloggers!).
And when it comes to B2B and B2C, content marketers rarely do have any followers. Where content marketers have to refer to so-called personas (or fake personas/fake influencers, people posing as influential or even invented people who never existed), blogging allows us to establish our Internet presence fast and almost without problems – so that we can promote our brand by becoming its face.
That’s right. What’s more, most of the times – if we’re successful – it does. Some people even claim that the most popular bloggers are but a facade for someone else’s content marketing operations (which isn’t true – it’s quite far from being true). We don’t even need to do much in order to transform our blog into such platform: in most cases, it’s more a matter of scale and approach. We start writing more, we invest in hiring writers, we can even hire one of the professional agencies to manage our blog and related social media channels for us. We post more and more and more. We gather more readers.
While – in the meantime – our startup grows.
It isn’t about reaching out to our potential customer or business partner – then letting them go. How could it be? B2C and B2B relations have to be maintained. Our blog won’t do it all for us – that much is certain – but it is sure to help us. The most important thing here is that our blog makes its readers feel like there’s our constant presence. The second most important thing is that it allows them to reach out to us, too, should they feel they need to, and that’s what can make a really big difference. If we’re not interested in one-way relations, blogging is surely a good way to go.
As our blog grows, so does our audience, and the growth of audience will sooner or later bring other bloggers to ask us about the possibility of text contribution. Such contributions are commonplace in the blogging community. The deal is simple: we offer people a place to publish their text, and they, in turn… provide the text. Sometimes, of course, it’s not all that simple, as some of them will want us to “give them a mention” – or even a link to their own blog or website. That being said, the deal is often fair, as guest posts are usually well-written and informative (which is understandable: after all, they have to encourage the readers to visit author’s site – thus, he or she has to show some writing skills and share interesting insights). And, although there are also cons of accepting guest posts, the most important thing on the pros side is the fact that when this happens and people start writing things for us, we can also use their blogs to post our texts – and hence, spread the word of what we’re doing.
Moreover, it requires far less time. We don’t have to pump text 24/7. All we have to do is to share interesting insights (interesting enough to maintain our audience interested in what we’re doing). If we’re interested in what we’re writing about ourselves – and it’s hard not to be interested in what our business is about… – the process becomes simple and natural. (Not that it doesn’t require some working.)
Isn’t it?
Have we interested you in starting a blog?
We have recently written an article on the most popular blogging platform/Content Management System, WordPress. It can be found here.
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