Blogging has become an invaluable piece of my business.
For a long time, I dismissed blogging as a waste of resource. However, after spending 18 consecutive months analysing female fashion blogs when working on TrendFriend, the benefits of blogging became more apparent.
Always open to an experiment, it interested me to see what the impact of blogging for one year would be on garymelican.com. This started in August 2019.
Traffic on the blog from Jan 2020 – September 2020
The Benefits of Blogging for garymelican.com
After struggling through the early stages of blogging, some upsides began to emerge.
More leads
It’s easy to assume that everyone knows what you do and should they need the service that you provide, they will naturally think of you.
In reality, everyone is busy with their own lives and will make decisions quickly, often without considering all options.
By blogging regularly, it allows you to remain top of peoples’ minds.
Since August 2019, garymelican.com has 3Xed in revenue due to a few factors. One of those definitely has been being top of peoples’ minds.
Better, self-qualified leads
When considering working with someone, it’s normal to read as much as you can about them online before engaging.
Blog posts serve as a reservoir of how you think both about your craft but also about life. This allows people to self-qualify whether they’ll work well with you or not.
A client mentioned to me last week that they got in touch about their web development project solely due to the 30 Day No Complaint Challenge they found on my blog. Although the post says nothing about web development, it gave us both the insight to know that we would align well on a personal level.
Clarity of thought
Writing about topics gives you a chance to analyse and understand them in-depth.
When brainstorming about the benefits of blogging, there were lots of ideas floating around in my head about what the supposed benefits have been.
Writing them down allowed me to more clearly understand the benefits of blogging on my business. This will also be useful when articulating the benefits to clients.
Why doesn’t everyone do it?
If there are so many obvious benefits to blogging, why doesn’t everyone do it?
Here are a list of reasons that are most common amongst people I talk to:
- 1) It’s difficult to prioritise writing a blog post over other more pressing matters. A blog post is something with which there is no obligation to write. A client waiting on a response may feel more pressing. This is the paradox of short term versus long term activities.
- 2) Fear of what others would think. It’s scary to share stuff on social media, especially when it’s somewhat personal.
- 3) The actual writing requirement is very difficult at the start. I too found the process really difficult at first but thankfully after a few attempts it got easier and more enjoyable.
- 4) Unaware of the value in blogging
Going forward: Goals for the next 12 months
Having found blogging to be very beneficial, the following goals have now been agreed for the blog for the next 12 months.
These include:
1) Be Consistent.
Publish a new article every two weeks, no matter how busy things are.
2) Write with First Hand Experience
Continue writing about topics where I have first hand experience. This is what I can stand by, attest to and ultimately provide most value to readers on.
3) Continue ranking #1 on Google for “Topless Running Dublin”
This has become oddly important to me.
To stay tuned for the coming year, feel free to subscribe below. If you’d rather not, that’s ok – you’ll have another chance to in 2 weeks 😉
