Is blogging worth the effort?

Like exercising, eating well or committing to anything worthwhile, blogging is hard work at the start but it gets easier the more you practise and the results can be impressive.

If you’re in business and want to ‘own’ your market niche, let me explain why you need to be blogging.

My experience

Typically there are over 1,300 unique visitors to my company’s website each week, with about 50% of these people coming via our blog. The blog is our way of providing valuable information for free, so people can get to know us.

On average, I’m then converting 6% to 7% of website visitors into ‘leads’, which I define as someone who has provided their details in exchange for some premium free content, like an eBook or planning template. The best way to do this is to include a call to action at the end of each blog post.

In total, this equates to nearly 100 people per week who are explicitly interested in our business, of which, over half find us via our blog.

For me, blogging is totally worth the effort.

The bad news

It took years of writing hundreds of blog articles to generate that much traffic and a swag of premium content to build up that level of conversion. The first 20 or 30 blog articles were likes ships passing in the night – no comments, no retweets, no readers.

Most people give up here, but if you can push through the dip, the rewards are just around the corner.

Long-term leverage

Think of each blog post as a conversation with a prospective customer. You help solve people’s problems every day, so just start by blogging about the most common ones.

In real life, relationships develop one conversation at a time. The same is true on the web. If your article helps one person, then it’s been worthwhile. More encouraging is that your article will continue to help other people for months and years into the future.

And the more articles you post, the larger your library of content that Google will index in its search results and the more traffic you’ll attract.

Marathon or sprint?

If I ask you the question: “Who wants to practise writing every single day?” Not many takers (usually).

“Who wants your content to go viral?” Yes, me, me, me!

Yet they are one and the same. It’s no secret, most marketers and entrepreneurs are praying for the overnight success of viral marketing.

But the truth is unless you’ve done the unsexy work of practising your writing, sharing it regularly and building a network, you’re seldom going to hit the jackpot!

Are you ready?

The opportunity to ‘own’ your market niche is still ripe for the picking, especially here in Australia. If there aren’t any authoritative bloggers in your industry, then it’s yours for the taking. If there are a few already, then you can still definitely earn your slice of the market.

The good news

Writing useful stuff is too hard for most of your competitors. Sharing it for free makes them uncomfortable. Using premium content to convert your readers into a pipeline of leads is too much effort. And doing all this consistently is out of the question because your competitors are ‘too busy’ and give up.

That, my friends, is the opportunity I’d love you to seize!

To practise what I preach, I’d like to invite you to access my most popular piece of premium content, the Web Strategy Planning Template (it’s a free download from our website).