7 Pressing Reasons To Have An Active Business Blog

Is maintaining your business blog becoming a terrifying nightmare?

You know what the internet world calls a business owner with a stale blog? Non-existent 🙁

You have seen wrong writers, littered content calendar, that pressurizingly blinking cursor, the content marketing gurus who force you to take care of alt tags, meta descriptions and other robotic parameters you don’t understand and you think it is better to let it go?

Take a seat. I’ll be your blog-therapist for today. And in the end, I’ll leave you feeling good + a cheeky grin guaranteed!

You are tired of deception from the so-called “helpers”. You download all the free content creation calendars that promise you to take away your blogging woes.

But then, you end up staring at a blank worksheet that asks you the exact same questions … you have been digging the mud for??

And you graze your face exactly like that witch from a horror movie…That’s okay, swallow your snot. There is something more horrifying than this….that blank screen…it feels like your voice is being throttled. But sometimes, you go on a rampage and type out that entire paragraph like a solo engine taking test rounds around the station…and then when you read it, you press the backspace until you go back in time…to an intimidating-blinking cursor. Story repeats, yeah?

So, you make up your mind and you try to hire a “writer”…but, you end up scrapping all the work you were DELIVERED. You look at the chunks of kooky words that hang like your most ill-fitting garment catching dust. When you hit the sack, you are having nightmares where your prospects are barfing on your website. Eiks!

Forget all of this.

One fine day, you recover from all of this drama because it was a Sunday morning! You’ve had a fantastic week and now that you have an interesting incident to share with your audience, you decide to blog on your website. You grab your mug of fresh green juice and sit in the sun with your biz machine aka your laptop. All was good until you fall back trying to avoid the glaring sun … having no clue where to start, build context or structure your writing. Agghh, too much work! And you quit, right?

Or maybe you wrote it off that evening and then 11 months have gone by, your blog dons that stale blog.

If this is your story, there is help coming soon.

Look boss, I agree, you have challenges! You wanna go smash those sales figures, rock those goal-sy meetings, attend networking events, figure out the perfect funnel, grow your email list, hunt for the tech wizards who can set things up for you, go live on that podcast and the list never ends. You have A LOT on your plate!

But, are you putting your blog on the back seat because your time is TAKEN up?

Psst…aren’t you making a mistake big gun?

Tossing your blogging plan backward means you’re chapping up your business plan. Wanna know why? Here are 7 reasons (out of 119 reasons btw) to keep your blog active.

Blogging cuts down your sales time by 50%

Your blog is the place where your prospects get to know you, learn about your personality and identify your voice. It is where you show them who you are, instead of telling them what it is about you that they should know to buy from you. I mean, that’s what you do in a sales call, right?

By reading one piece of writing on your blog, your prospect has a registered impression about you. Now, it is up to you to build the tempo from here. A job well begun is half done? Obviously! You are already half your way through in winning that prospect. So, go blog darling!

Blogging gives you fodder to feed your social media profiles

You cannot go live 14 times a week to share your thoughts on social media. But, you can have blogs written to let the world (your customers) know, what your opinion on an issue is.

Now, why do you want to lose a stream of high-quality traffic just because you lack a blog?

Why do you want to send back those interested prospects to your competitors?

I repeat, why leave money on that frickin’ table?

Blogging makes you that money-making list

How else do you want to grow your email list? Yeah, you can tell me we have chatbots. But you know what? The chatbot is a vulnerable media. One click and poof, your messages are muted. You wanna talk to deaf ears? Nah…

I’d love to know if you have another method to grow your list (I am curious)

So, listen to me, get your blog up and going. Because honey, in that list is your money!

Nurture your authority. Earn respect as an expert

Imagine you are an authority figure or an influencer in your industry. If I meet you downtown and won’t stop admiring you and your work, how’d you feel? Mind=Blown!

That’s why, grow your authority. And this is a no-brainer. Come on, you are an expert already, and that’s why you are running a business. IT’s not just about someone admiring you. It’s the recognition that fetches you reputation. Your reputation is everything when you’re in business.

I’ll show you 5 easy ways to build authority…right here, right now

Recommend products you use (clink clink..already making money from affiliate marketing? Nice uh!)
Give your audience helpful tips that they can ACT upon (they’ll thank you forever and feel indebted to you even if they are paying money to get your secret tips and saucy advice)
Get yourself featured on elite publications and look at how clients swarm your doorway. (In case you don’t know, check out my piece on the prestigious Thrive Global that got me 3 new leads within a week of posting it)
Make powerful connections and flaunt them. This isn’t hard at all. All you have to do is one round-up post on your blog featuring influencers from your industry and you have an invaluable network in your back pocket.
Once you do these 4 steps, you become a “credible source of valuable information” naturally. You become more authoritative.

Now, all you have to do is, share information + ideas consistently.

Blogging brings Traffic + SEO

If you have a website and do not want traffic, you are mad. I mean, not you you..come on you obviously want traffic. Imagine leads come and land on your website and they head to your services page and end up hiring you. All because you shared a blog post of yours on social media. And, if you have kickass copy + a fantastic funnel, nobody can stop you from building your list, growing your biz and making a ton of money.

Plus, there is a lot of noise out there. You can cut through that noise by talking to people in your voice on your blog, on your uncluttered space. So, my dear, get a blog!

Tip: If you need more information on SEO, check it out here.

Strike conversations with your clients over a blog post

Your blog can act like an intense knowledge dissipating FAQ repository. The information can itself act as sales objection tackling mechanism which puts your prospects in your pipeline. Having your would-be clients in your digital vicinity is cool, right?

Also, who doesn’t want an opportunity to talk to clients isn’t it?

Offer YOUR solutions (services) to your clients’ problems (opportunity)

Imagine talking about a meeting in your office that sped up productivity that leads to you landing a high-ticket client. If you talk about those innate occurrences and unique experiences, you are making your clients believe you are a real, working breathing human being. And they trust you enough to buy from you.

Quick Recap

To conclude, your blog is not just beneficial for your business, it is your creative asset. It helps you capture your voice and your reader’s attention.

Your blog is the virtual bridge that connects you with your customers. If you want to resonate with your clients, build your personal brand, grow your authoritativeness, drive traffic to your website and benefit from all of the other advantages it comes with, get your blog running.

P.S: If you are totally convinced that your blog has to have a game on but you do not have the time or capacity to maintain your blog, click here.

How to write a gripping blog post in 50 minutes?

by Roshni Shaikh

IMPORTANT: I wrote this blog in 50 minutes.

You are a new blogger.

You love seeing 100 blog posts on your website.

You want to make your website an arsenal of good content.

But, you haven’t written a blog in a week. Oh wait, I think it has been a month. Right?

How do you write a blog post quickly? Here is what you need to write quick, snap and post.

Keep logging ideas that make good blog posts

The biggest impediment a blogger faces is – “What do I blog about? What do I write? I don’t know where to start. How do I come up with good topics?”

You feel like you have run short of topics to write. But, it is not the case if you take little more effort to log ideas.

Your mind is an idea machine. The kind of power it holds is insane, in a good way. Make a note of those crazy ideas and turn them into barrels of blogs.

To start with, make a note of problems YOU are facing as a blogger. When you have found traction in collecting topics, go eavesdrop other bloggers’ problems.

Look at those blogger communities, they are flooded with problems in the form of questions. Go find the answers to those questions and help your fellow mates and more importantly, help yourself. Write more.

How to choose from my list of topics?

I am writing this post because I needed to start writing. I needed to kill those innumerable distractions from Facebook Groups and Linkedin Feed. (Let’s talk about the lame videos everybody is making on LinkedIn in my next post.)

Or, if you are anything like me, the other biggest impediment is a situation like this – “Oh, I have too many topics! Where do I start? Which one do I choose? No, I will save this one to publish later. Oh, this is the best topic, but I will save it for some special occasion.”

Do you ever have this kind of a monologue going on?

Choose the one that you feel is your closest current need. Choose the topic where you think you have more ideas about. Is it not easier to start this way?

Identify the core reason for the problem

You have chosen a topic.

You type out the headline and then what?

The problem I am talking about here is about getting a blog written quickly. I solve the problem by showing you how I solved it for myself.

Do not sit lingering about giving your post a sassy introduction already. Just start typing. I used the word typing, not writing. The first line of this post is the last thing I wrote. Makes sense right?

Start with the problem, talk about the first step and gather momentum from there. “One step at a time”, these five words are not random and overused. Think about it and try and stick to smaller goals in a day to achieve big. The catch is, sticking to the smaller goals. So, solve the core problem in smaller steps. Make use of headings to do this.

Write in a pollution-free zone

You can have your kid running around while you are writing. I wouldn’t call that a distraction. You can have 37 more tabs open. I won’t call it a distraction although you can consider shutting them down.

But writing in a place polluted with features, icons, widgets, plugins and unwanted BS all around your writing space is the biggest distraction. Technology can be a hindrance in situations like these.

I used to write directly on WordPress and I can’t tell you what kind of a fool I was to do that. It killed my productivity and buried it in Antarctica.

Choose a writing space that has minimal features. MS Word is good, but it has portability issues.

To write this piece quick in no more than 50 minutes, I made use of a clean writing environment. It is called Airstory.

I am not an affiliate to Airstory. I am endorsing it because it has helped me boost my productivity. Airstory turns me into a word monster. Try it here and let me know how it goes.

Shut all other windows

I have a problem. I love beautifying things and I suffer from the pathetic perfection syndrome. It is probably because I deal with obsession every single second. Obsessed with bringing the best. But I have to throw this truth here.

Looking for perfection is like living in a limbo. You don’t know whether the totem is spinning for real or not.

Being obsessed is a good thing.

You cannot be an entrepreneur if you are not obsessed with your work.

You have to love and bathe in your work if you are an entrepreneur.

But, an obsession of the other kind – to perfectize the bigger picture is what will drag you down and pin you there. That is exactly what happened to me.

I was obsessed with the bigger picture. I was afraid of breaking rules. I was afraid to invent words (like perfectize ). I was too afraid to compromise the green color a plugin gave me to indicate my SEO score. There were too many factors judging my writing even before it got published; even when nobody was watching it.

I broke free from all of it and wrote in a clean white dynamic space. See for yourself. I did it.

Write now. Edit Later

It took me years to do this.

Again, the perfection syndrome is the culprit. I cannot get past grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in general.

I have caught errors in writings of few of the top writers in the world (no exaggeration). I mailed them the errors and have heard back about the correction and a compliment – “Good catch!”. I have such an eye for detail.

This ability of mine was countering my own productivity. Now I knew why they were the best writers in the world and why I am just a fly catching their errors. You get it, right? Just edit later if you want to get somewhere one day.

Time your writing

You don’t need fancy chess timers on your table or an extra downloadable software or an online tool that sucks up your time asking you to create an account to save time (Oxymoron alert for the less sarcastic).

All you need is a simple timer by Google. Just Google “timer”, enter the time, hit start and you have a watch telling you to focus.

I aimed to complete an 800+ word article in 40 minutes. I arrived at a 1000+ word blog in 50 minutes. Not too bad eh?

Conclusion

Now, this blog did not require as much research because I spoke about how I solved my own problem. I had the requirement, I had the data, I ruled the style and tone. So, I could write it super fast.

But for articles that are backed by stats, research is what takes time. With that too, the above tips can boost your writing speed.

If you want to be productive and create an arsenal of blog posts, you have to write quick and write dirty, first. How can you make that possible?

Start by logging ideas.

Do not waste time finding good topics.

Use a timer.

Will you start logging ideas from today? That is the first step.

So what will you blog about now?

Comment your topic here and go start writing. Why did I ask you to comment? If you leave a comment here, you will be obliged to write about the topic and that is a good obligation that solves your blogging woes. Right? Now, go write.

P.S: I will be true to you. The editing took me another 15 minutes.