Whenever I talk about blogging to someone they always give me a weird face.
It’s not unlike the face they make when I tell them I collect Funko dolls.
It’s sort of like they want to say that I’m a fucking idiot for suggesting that they sit down and actually write content when they believe there are more effective ways to not only build a business but to grow it.
But that face doesn’t hide anything!
It lets me know that they just don’t understand why blogging is important for your online business.
So in this post, I’m not going to try and convince you as to why blogging is important for your business. Instead, I’m going to show you why blogging is important for OUR brands and maybe you’ll be able to see how you can apply to your own business.
Oh, you might be someone who considers themselves a blogger and you’re here because you like the title of this post. Let me tell you right now that blogging is a business. Your blog itself ISN’T the business.
It’s the marketing department for your business. And that’s what makes blogging worth it.
The Basic Formula for Business
All businesses follow an extremely basic formula:
Audience x Offer = MoneyYou really don’t need to try to complicate things.
That’s it.
When you have a business you need to have an audience and an offer for that audience. If you’re making money with ads then your audience is the advertisers and your offer is the traffic that comes to your site.
So how does blogging help in this equation?
It’s not the offer because writing content and presenting isn’t going to be the thing that actually makes you money unless people are paying for that content. So that content has to serve the purpose of building up your audience and that is what it should be doing.
When you write a blog post, you aren’t doing it for yourself. You’re doing it to attract people to your business.
Yes, you can do this in a myriad of other ways:
- YouTube
- Paid Ads
But almost all of those still require you to send people back to SOMETHING and it usually isn’t a homepage with just some information.
Blog posts give you the opportunity to do five magical things:
- Help your audience
- Build trust with your audience
- Conduct research
- Establish authority
- Create connections
Both of these things are equally important.
1. Helping Your Audience
Too many people go into the mindset of building an online business simply thinking how can they make money and the answer is always the same: help people.
The more people you’re able to help in an effective manner, the more money you’ll make.
Your worth to the world is based on the value that you’re able to put out and value is measured by how much you help people.
That’s important to remember. Figure out how you can help people, and as cliché, as this sounds it’s true, the money will follow.
But it’s hard for people to understand how you can help them when you aren’t putting stuff out into the world. Some people like to focus by doing it on YouTube. TikTok is a big thing now.
Blogging is extremely valuable because people still use Google to find answers. People have no problem reading something that will finally provide them with the answers that they are looking for.
Blogging is your opportunity to help your audience. Look at this site for example.
We have 100s of blog posts that all have the intention of helping you in some way. The more we can help (the more valuable content we produce), the more people we will attract (assuming we promote things correctly).
You run an online business, not a brick-and-mortar pizza chain so putting ads up on bus benches isn’t going to do you much good.
Blogging is not only helpful for your audience, but it becomes your source of advertising.
It’s you putting a giant beacon down and letting the world know that you exist.
And once they see that you exist it leads to the next important thing.
2. Building the Trust of Your Audience
Here at Odd Noodle, we’ve developed a simple framework known as the Pocket Business Framework.
- Get them to notice you
- Get them to pay attention to you
- Get them to trust you
- Convert that trust into money
Blogging helps with every single one of these steps in the framework.
When you write a blog post you get to promote it. That’s how you get people to notice you.
Because that blog post is so awesome you get to keep the attention of people.
Because that blog post and all of the other blog posts that you write are extremely helpful and allow someone to solve a problem they begin to trust you.
Because they trust you they are more likely to buy from you.
How many online businesses create a valuable resource (a blog) and find that it doesn’t help their business at all?
Think about it.
If you’re waking up every single day and thinking about how you can best serve your audience then how is it harmful for you to create a resource that does that?
The only drawbacks occur when you believe it is a waste of time and people only see it as a waste of time if they can’t get a ton of traffic.
But it’s not about getting a ton of traffic although that is very possible with a blog.
It’s about getting the right traffic.
But what makes this even better is that she was doing it with just 20,000 monthly sessions on her website.
That isn’t a lot.
But that wouldn’t have happened if she didn’t blog.
What blogging did for her was help her unlock her Hero and her blog posts let the Hero know that Alexa was the perfect guide for them and because of that they bought her products.
3. Conduct Research
Business really is about knowledge. Knowledge of what your audience really wants and blogging does a great job of helping you discover that.
How?
By putting content out there to see what sticks. What content gets the biggest reaction?
What content causes people to ask you questions?
Everything that we do with regard to creating new offers happens because we get to see the questions that people ask because of our blog posts.
It’s always easy to assume you know exactly what someone needs without talking to them, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s no different than a musician trying out a different type of music. They can only guess at what their audience’s reaction will be.
Why not just get it out there and see?
4. Establish Authority
If you really want to make good money online then it’s important that you establish yourself as an authority.
How?
By talking about a topic extensively and showing that you know what you’re talking about.
Establishing authority is hard to do overnight, but after a couple of months or years of blogging, you’ll have a paper trail (not literally) of knowledge to show the world that you know what you’re talking about.
And when they see that you know what you’re talking about they’ll begin to view you as an authority and who doesn’t want to buy from an authority?
5. Building Connections
I’ll admit that I’m a bit of a loner.
Yes, I have a wonderful wife and three hellions. Oh, and I also work with a killer partner.
But if I had to be on my own then I would have no problem
It’s how I was raised. Don’t rely on others and for many years that’s what I did.
I figured if I was going to build something great then it was all on my shoulders to make it happen.
But you know what?
It’s a lot easier to reach the top of the mountain with someone else’s help and blogging can be a great way to build connections because as people get to see your views on things they begin to align with you.
And guess what?
People want to work with people that they align with.
So blogging can be a great way for you to simply say that you exist and if you want to I’d love a chance to partner up.
Blogging Is Hard
I’ll admit though that blogging isn’t easy.
I’m not here to tell you that when you start a blog you get to sit down, start writing, and magical things happen. It takes time to understand who you’re talking to but once you figure out that person and they discover you, then magical things will happen.
I know this because I’ve had the exact same experience with my own blog journey and unfortunately you don’t get to create a successful blog overnight.
And that’s okay.
Why Blogging Is Important
So why is blogging important?
Because it establishes you as the go-to for your audience. It lets them know that they can trust you and that you’re going to be there for them.
It helps you build your audience.
It’s marketing.
It’s research.
Blogging is always more than someone thinks it is. It’s so important to us that it’s one of the fundamental pieces of a business that we teach.
When we created Obsidian Tavern we made sure we started with a blog. Why? Because it only makes sense to do so.
