Should you spend time blogging this year?

To blog or not to blog, that is the question on a lot of people’s minds these days. I see frequent posts online, for example, asking, “Should I blog?”, “Is blogging worth it?”, “Does my website need a blog?”. 

I get it. As business owners or service providers we are inundated with a laundry list of tasks we should be actively completing and when we do, it feels like we’re being pulled away from the work we always intended to be doing.

Before you get deterred by things like word count, defining topics, “becoming a writer”, or that maybe a blog hasn’t worked for you in the past, consider this: your website is the most important part of your business, aside from you.

Learn more about how your website works and why creating consistent, new content within your own domain is worth at least some of your time.

Why your website is the most important part of your business

When bloggers, marketers, and strategists tell you how important blogging is, what they’re really saying is that your website is both valuable and consequential.

Some people choose to spend time on social media versus blogging, but they aren’t interchangeable. One is a social engagement side of marketing while the other can serve both behind-the-scenes and organically.

Consider Twitter. What was once a dominant social platform has… shifted, to say the least. With brands and high-profile users leaving the platform, remaining profiles have reported seeing a massive drop in engagement.

What happens when you lose the sole marketing route you have put all your time and effort into?

You have to start over again.

This is a chance you take when you rely on using any proprietary service. The terms you agree to when you sign-up can basically be to expect the unexpected and that anything may change at a moment’s notice.

Yes, social media is an important tool to use for businesses because that’s where your customers hang out. 

Your website though, is the hub to tie-in all your marketing efforts together. 

The top 3 reasons your website is more important than your social media:

1. You have control over your brand, content, and accounts.
2. Your website is working for you, 24/7, for direct or referral traffic.
3. Your website is working for you, 24/7, organically for new traffic.

Control over your brand

You just never know what choices or changes are going to be made when it comes to a third-party service or product.

• Ensure your logo and brand are conveyed as intended
• Have the space (room) to communicate your message
• Direct your domain where and when you need to
• Access your server database and files, to export and migrate
• Having a mailing list can ensure you maintain your ‘follower’ information

Referral website traffic

Each and every one of your social media profiles gives you a website URL to fill out. A lot of users check these links to gather more information about the person or organization they’re engaging with.

Why you shouldn’t use a link-in-bio tool in place of your website address:

While there IS a usefulness for link-in-bio tools (think: content creators who share tracking links to numerous products on the daily or celebrity gossip accounts who have a never-ending rotation of who is doing what), many other individuals started using these tools in their profiles in place of sharing their existing website URL.

On the surface it may feel efficient to use a link-in-bio landing page instead of your website, but doing so can also:

• Disconnect your brand – visually and navigationally,
• Drive traffic somewhere else like Linktree instead of your own domain,
• Render you unable to access your content in the event of a service outage, and
• Cause additional clicks in the user experience for those in search of information.

💡 Tip: Instead of using a link-in-bio solution, consider how you can utilize your existing website to serve the same need. For example, if you’ve identified the most important links to share with your audience, is this same information outlined on your home or landing page? If you haven’t yet created website content pertaining to this information, you could also use this as an opportunity to publish posts and link to your blog feed page instead.

At the very least, you could create a special landing page on your website that mimics the link-in-bio layout and functionality, while maintaining your brand, domain, and content.

Organic website traffic

For the visitors who haven’t yet been introduced to you or your business, you rely on a good old-fashioned search engine query and SEO to direct new traffic to your website.

If social media is akin to having curious customers who happened by your storefront, a website is like having your ‘salon’ located in the ‘hair’ district of the city. These customers are already shopping with intent – actively looking for you.

So what does this all mean in the long run?

How your website works

Your domain (website address) is configured to point to a server that stores database entries and files for your website. This information is then displayed in a browser based on the code used to build and style each web page.

We use browsers like Chrome, Safari, or Firefox to view websites online. If someone already knows the URL/domain of your website, this is known as a direct link, and it would be bookmarked or entered in the browser to navigate to your website.

Eventually, SERP was created – and ranking well on search engine result pages, organically, became an imperative marketing component.

Users type what they’re looking for into a search engine and thousands of results are displayed.

Once upon a time we would input whatever we wanted into each of our web page meta titles, descriptions, and keywords and trust in the internet to provide us with a continuous flow of new website visitors. Ahh, the good ole days. It lasted like five minutes.

Over time, search engines like Google have made several changes to the SERP landscape including the introduction of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with paid ad placement at the top of search results, embedding products and shopping at the top of search results, and consistently reworking their own algorithms that determine organic site ranking and placement.

As a result, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become an industry of its own, constantly evolving, keeping us on our toes.

We (a royal collective of developers, marketers, and users) attempt to stay up to date on changes, best practices, recommendations, and the like in an effort to optimize our websites the best we can.

How often do I need to update my website?

My personal answer is: as often as it needs to be updated, while remaining manageable.

I know. Not helpful, right? I’ll go into more detail on the considerations to ask yourself to determine your answer to this question. Because I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all approach.

Creating a website and then just leaving it without any strategy, effort, or updates won’t result in much return. There is too much competition and noise out there to set it and forget it.

We (that collective I told you about) do know that updating your website over time is beneficial. It is scanned and indexable when new content is published. It tells both our fellow human and digital crawler friends that we’re current, up-to-date, ready to assist, and willing to share our knowledge.

Okay cool. So we know having a website and updating it consistently is important. But now what? I imagine someone out there right now thinking, ‘but we agonized over my web page copy for a month, my services and bio haven’t changed, what content on my website am I supposed to update now?!’

If you’re not someone who has a revolving door of content updates like a portfolio, directory, calendar of events, or seasonal messaging, the recommendation is to start blogging.

How a blog helps improve your website

Blogging provides the opportunity to create new content/copy without making major adjustments to the more static pages of your site that require little change over time.

Google uses a framework designed to apply different factors to rank online content: ‘E-E-A-T’ which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

In order to make their customers (users) happy, their product (search engine) needs to return quality results, otherwise an alternative will be used. So, Google claims their algorithms focus on providing content that is people-first and reliable.

When there are thousands of other websites competing for similar key search terms on the general pages of your site, a blog post is an opportunity to narrow down on a topic or niche and hone-in on a focus keyword.

Service pages can be really difficult to rank for because they are competing directly with other individuals or organization’s websites who offer the same services (keywords).

Or, if you are trying to rank for multiple keywords on the same web page, your page may not rank as well as a competitor who is focusing on only one.

How you utilize the blogging function of your website is up to you, but the overall purpose of Posts versus Pages is the ability to create specialized content that can be tagged, categorized, and edited as needed, providing you with a custom URL that allows you to share this content directly.

Consider the main pages of my website: 

• the home/landing page, 
• about page, 
• services page, and 
• contact page. 

If I was dependent on only these pages, I would have a harder time ranking well within my industry. 

By providing supplementary, helpful content by way of Posts, I rank well for focus keywords and improve the overall “score” for the rest of my website.

Do you have time to blog?

You determine your strategy and schedule, even if that means actively opting out of one.

The mistake that I see people making is hearing the most common out-of-the-box recommendation of: Publish one blog post per week, and then inevitably getting twisted out of shape trying to make that goal work rather than strategizing what you have to work with before going into it – and setting a more realistic goal.

I don’t know about you but when I write my blog posts, they take time. I’m not a speedy writer, I edit a lot. If I were to pump out a blog post every week, I genuinely don’t know where that time would come from.

So, instead, I commit myself to one blog post per month. After completing this goal for a year throughout 2024, I can confirm that it was worth it in terms of the time I spent and the results I saw.

Most people are nervous to blog because of three major factors:

1. The time commitment
2. Figuring out what to write about
3. Actual writing and editing

There are two realms of thought. Some will tell you that it’s not worth doing anything half-heartedly and you need a strategy to blog. Others will say, just write, post, get into a habit – showing up is the first step.

As someone who HAS blogged without a plan – threw words at the screen only for them to fizzle out, I personally feel like finding a happy medium between the two is the best place to start if you’re new to blogging.

These are the considerations that I make when it comes to my own blogging:

• Coming up with topics
• Determining keywords
• Copywriting
• Copyediting
• Formatting
• SEO review
• Photography or curation of stock elements
• Scheduling/publishing

Here are more content and copywriting tips for blogging, including some of the more technical, accessible, and SEO-friendly.

Should you spend time blogging this year?

Social media, newsletters, podcasts, they are all great. But they’re also all better served when you have a hub that brings your community, resources, and online efforts together in a single place – that you can maintain and control. 

Maintaining a blog on your website can improve your site in search rankings, give your customers resources and support, and improve your brand recognition.

Basically giving your website a personality, voice, and brain, turning it into a 24/7 marketing machine.