You’ve started a successful corporate training business. Now, you’re exploring ways to grow and get more clients. Of course, social media stands out as one of the more effective ways to meet your goals. You’ve created a LinkedIn profile. You’re active on Facebook and Twitter. There’s just one area where you haven’t stepped foot.
Blogging; should you do it or not? That depends on your goals. It also depends on the resources you have available. If you’re considering a blog, here are a few things to think about.
No Blog is Better Than a Dead Blog
If you’ve ever clicked into a blog and discovered it hasn’t been updated in months, that’s disappointing. If you were searching for current information or insights, even more so. A dead blog also leaves a company website with a neglected, unprofessional feeling. It’s like visiting a store and realizing that nobody has bothered to replace the old sales notices with new ones.
A blog for any business is a commitment. It requires that you write and publish posts regularly. Then there’s the matter of promoting your posts, and responding to engagement. Most importantly, if you want your blog to become and remain evergreen, your posts have to relevant, researched, and backed by solid data.
Fortunately, there are ways that you can keep an active blog even if you are busy. You can invite others to write guest posts for you. Another option is recycling old content and updating it. Curating great content from other sources is another way to keep an active blog if you are struggling to produce content regularly.
A Blog Can Build Trust And Community if You Are a Newer Business
If your business is relatively new, and you are still in the process of cementing your reputation and building relationships, blogging can really help. By maintaining a great blog, you build your reputation, earn trust, and accumulate a following.
Blogging also gives you a medium that you can use to allow people to get to know your business, your products, and your services in a way that isn’t pushy or ‘salesy’. Finally, by blogging you can establish thought leadership. What better way to demonstrate your knowledge of corporate training, and the specific industries that you work in than to share that knowledge. You can do that through owned media like a blog much more effectively than any other means.
There is a Technical Side to Blogging Though
One of the challenges you may face isn’t with writing posts. It will be with the technical side of blogging. To create a successful blog, you have to consider hosting options, selecting a URL, analytics, and a variety of other things. Then there’s a matter of keeping your blog active and competitive. That means topic research, selecting and using the right keywords, and earning backlinks.
If you don’t make the right decisions, your blog may not get the traffic and engagement you want. In some cases, those mistakes can cause your website to earn search engine penalties. Launching your blog may be the most intimidating step of all. Fortunately, there’s great help available. There is a great tutorial available for anyone who wants to learn how to create a blog.
But You Don’t Have to be a Great Writer to Have a Blog
Many people refuse to start blogging because they simply aren’t great writers. This is a shame, because the kind of writing that makes a successful blog is unique. This isn’t academic writing. It isn’t fiction writing. A blog is simply you communicating, in plain language, with your target audience.
In fact, in some ways, the very nature of blogging is counter to what many people consider ‘proper writing’. Bloggers often write in the second person to communicate directly with their readers. They use small paragraphs, bullet points, and short sentences.
Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean that anything goes. As a corporate trainer, you are going to be held to high standards when it comes to spelling, grammar, and accuracy. Still, between your knowledge and a few tools such as Grammarly, there’s no reason that you cannot produce interesting, well-written blog posts.
A Blog Can Help You Sell Digital Products
Many corporate trainers sell digital products as a secondary income source. These include, ebooks, training software, videos, webinars, and self-paced courses. If you blog, you can use your posts to help promote and sell those products.
In your blog you can, include snippets and samples of the products you have to sell. You can share information about the value and benefits of your products. You can also talk about relevant topics and organically link to your digital products.
Your Blog Can Boost SEO
This is search engine 101. When you add new content to your website, you get the attention of search engines. They then send ‘spiders’ to crawl and index that new content. The result is an improvement in search engine results, and increased ranking for the keywords that you choose to use in your posts.
Yes, maintaining a blog is hard work. There may be some who are better off not starting one in the first place. Those people are few and far between. There are simply too many benefits to having a blog. Blogging remains one of the best way to create engagement with learners and clients. If you haven’t started a corporate training blog yet, now is a good time to start.
