Episode Transcript

Jake Braun:

Welcome to Kickin’ it with Kapok, a podcast about business stories and marketing advice. I'm Jake.

Mirela Setkic:

And I'm Mirela.

Jake Braun:

This is episode 25, “Top 7 Things You Need to Know About Blogging as a Business.” Today, Mirela and I will be talking about blogging. Let’s jump right into our list of things every business should know about blogging.
Number one is going to be that anyone can blog. So you don't have to be any sort of marketing guru or anything. You just need to be confident in the fact that you're a business owner and you're probably an expert about whatever it is your business does or the industry that you're in.

Mirela Setkic:

You have something to say.

Jake Braun:

You do, so once you realize that you have something to say then you just need to write. Just write the blog post and just focus on something you know. Focus on something you care about within your business, and just make sure it's related to your business. Stay on topic about whatever you decide to write about and the other main thing to keep in mind, is the headline. The headline's probably the most important part to a certain extent. You want a headline that's going to cause people to click when you share it and that's going to entice people when they first land on the page. The headline's super important so just make sure that it is enticing and engaging and is going to make someone read your article but just don't get too clickbaity where it's like-

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, don't be a con artist.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, this one weird trick that you need to save two hundred dollars on car insurance in Florida. Like that works for certain stuff but if you're running, you know most businesses, you just want to stick with something not too clickbaity.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, I strongly dislike blog posts that make me think I'm going to see something new, something like oh no one has seen this before. Here's the answer to whatever and then I click on it and then the persons just like rambling and rambling and then I just x out and leave. The title did not match the body of the blog post.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, most of the people using those headlines are doing something slightly different than what most local business owners are going to want to be doing so probably avoid that.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, and another benefit of blogging is that it's a really good way to build your brand image and kind of develop your voice and develop your brand image and how you want people to see you, how you want people to hear you and also perceive you. And how I guess it's a good way to build authority in your industry. If your customers and even if your competitors or anyone outside your business sees that you are coming up with really good and useful information, you're putting that out there, then you are kind of like the go-to person in your industry and people start to respect you and your brand and all of that can be done through some blogging.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, and that's a good place to do it. You definitely can build up you're authority and that's going to help you as a business and I guess that kinda ties in with number three, which is that it can help your website SEO. By building content and answering the questions that people are asking that is looked upon favorably by Google. They are looking for content that answers people's questions, that's ultimately what they are. They're a search engine. People are searching for things and they're trying to find the best answer to provide that person so when you write the content that answers the questions that people are asking, that's an excellent first step to do doing well with SEO, ranking higher organically in Google's search results.
So I always recommend starting with something that's more specific. It's going to be easier to rank higher for those things when you blog about them. If you go after something super generic, especially in a competitive industry, you're going up against people who already have built up a lot of authority and they've already answered the questions really well. So you can certainly compete with them but if you're just getting started out, that's probably not the best bet. Go after something specific that you know about, like we mentioned earlier and just write a really good specific answer.
And really don't even think about it just from the SEO perspective. You're also building your brand and you're just building up good content that you can use for other purposes, unless you have a really big budget and a lot of time on your hands, SEO is going to be pretty tough for you when you're just starting out. So it's definitely something that it's a benefit but don't make it be the only thing that you're thinking about when you're blogging because you might get disappointed, especially early on if you're only focused on that.

Mirela Setkic:

Yes, and it doesn't have to be super complicated and super intricate. You don't have to reveal these one of a kind revelations or be, or think like oh my god, I have to have something super amazing to say and something that's totally revolutionary otherwise I shouldn't be writing about anything. It can be, you can write about simple things, whatever your customers are thinking about and asking about, write about that and just think that everything has been said and done before. You should just do it and say it your way and put your spin on it and make it relevant to your customers.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, and hopefully when you do that you get a little bit of an SEO boost.

Mirela Setkic:

That's true and really which brings us to number four and that's about just making deep connections with your customers through blogging and kind of revealing your inner soul and your inner expert to them through your blog post, so they kinda come to you when they need help and one of the seminars we attended, a marketing seminar, one of the speakers talked about stories and how human beings trade stories to connect with other people. You can think of your blog post as that. It's you telling the story of your business, of your brand and kind of interweaving your customers questions into those stories. You know, your customers want to know who you are, what you do, why do you do what you do. So, tell them all of those things and just keep your customer in mind when you're writing your blog post. You're not trying to win an award or be the most prolific writer or any of that stuff. Unless you're in the business of being the most prolific writer, then you don't need to be.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, and in additional to your customers learning from you, you can also learn from them, see how they react to the blog post and you might shift your strategy a little bit once you see which blog posts are doing well or what people are commenting or what they're coming back and saying to you based on what you write about. It can really be a two way street.

Jake Braun:

Yes, and also kinda keep an eye on things that people are saying when they call your business, when they email your business, when they interact with your business on social media. If you do a Facebook post and whole bunch of your customers leave questions about something pertaining to that post, maybe that is a good topic for your next blog post. So, just kind of stay in tune with what people are demanding, what the masses want I guess.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, getting questions that people commonly ask either to are sales people or on social media-

Mirela Setkic:

Yes, sales people.

Jake Braun:

A great place to get topics for your blog post that you're going to write. Which really ties in with our next one, number five, it's the perfect choice to go omnichannel and omnichannel is a big buzzword out there. It really just means using multiple channels together to gain some synergy. So it's a situation where hopefully one plus one equals three instead of two.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah. And kinda I guess, the way I look at it, is like thinking, you think about where are people buying products or services like yours and do you need to be there. If you need to be there then you should be there but you shouldn't be trying to be everywhere.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, don't-

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, some life platforms are not relevant for you.

Jake Braun:

Don't stretch yourself too thin, do as many platforms as you can reasonably and as many promotional channels as you can. And like we were just getting into it a little bit before, it's the perfect opportunity, blogging is to, you know, share that blog post on other promotion channels, whether it's social media or anywhere else and it's also a good tool to use as marketing or sales collateral. You know, if one of your sales people, they do have that question that they get asked a lot, and then you went ahead and wrote that blog post about it, they can just go ahead and email the link to that blog post in addition to whatever else they want to say, with "Hey, here's so more information about that. We get that question a lot actually and heres the answer to it and here's why maybe our product is the right solution to that or why that objection isn't necessarily something to be concerned about because we outlined here why, you know, why it's not."

Mirela Setkic:

And really that could be the thing that tips the sale in your favor. If someone is on the fence or someone is deciding whether to do business with you versus someone else in your industry. If you send them information that's relevant and seems like you really care about your customers and you took the time to actually answer the question in the form of a blog post, that could convey to that customer that you are the more caring business and that he or she should go with you.

Jake Braun:

But also be honest.

Mirela Setkic:

Right.

Jake Braun:

It sometimes means you know, maybe not losing a customer but maybe losing a customer in the short term, like disclose pricing.

Mirela Setkic:

Right.

Jake Braun:

Like you explain how much the website costs and maybe some people aren't going to buy the website from you then, they're going to go somewhere else but that's probably good for both you and them. If you're price wasn't a good match for them, then you know, giving them the honest answer, telling them where they can get it cheaper or more expensive if they need a higher quality or you know, something you don't offer, then maybe later on they do realize that your product is a good match. You've educated them and they trust you because you were willing to maybe give up the business in a sense to point them in the right direction.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, you're essentially putting the customer first.

Jake Braun:

Yeah.

Mirela Setkic:

And you are saying I care about you and your wants and your needs and I want you to get the best service or product that matches your needs and if I'm not that person, I'm okay with it, here's where you can get a better match for what you're looking for and I think people most of the time are going to appreciate the honesty that you put out there instead of just saying, yeah I can do this for you and just kinda taking people's money and not really being able to deliver on what they need.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, and especially the pricing, people are going to figure it out.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah.

Jake Braun:

The first thing I do when a website doesn't have pricing is I Google the name of that product-

Mirela Setkic:

Right.

Jake Braun:

Plus pricing in Google and then either a competitor discloses pricing on that particular thing or you end up on a review site that discloses the pricing of you and all of your competitors and then that just gives the person the opportunity to get more educated about your competitors and have more of a reason to maybe go with one of them instead.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, so just be honest and I always say that honesty is the best policy-

Jake Braun:

Yeah.

Mirela Setkic:

And you can't win every customer, you shouldn't even be trying to and that's okay.

Jake Braun:

Yup.

Mirela Setkic:

Which takes us to the next point of the fact that blogging allows you as a business to really control your promotional efforts. You get to craft a story, you framed a story, you write the story, you present the story so it gives you a lot of control over how you want to promote your business and your products and services. So, instead of being I guess beholden to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, you control that. It's on your website so for example, if you are relying on Facebook for all your promotional stuff and one day Facebook decides that they don't want to be Facebook anymore and they delete all your stuff, they've deleted it, it's gone. They're not going to call you up and say, "Hey Bob, we're thinking about deleting everything, do you want to save any of your stuff?" They're just going to wipe it out.
But when your blog content is on your website, you own it and you also have the luxury of repurposing it. You can take a blog post and make a video about it. You can create an Instagram story from it. You can do an Instagram post, you can do a lot with it and the other powerful thing is that you can collect people's emails addresses, people who come to your blog and you can send them notifications when a new blog post comes out which is very powerful. So, it's a good way to keep people coming for more.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, and one of the other things you can do is, I'm sure you've gotten these on your phone where you get the little push notification that something has happened in an app or on a website and you can do the same thing with your blog pretty easily. You install this little plugin or whatever and then when you get a new, it asks people to opt in on your website, "Do you want to get notified when this website has a new post?" And it sends it to all the people who have agreed. So it's just like email but it's just another way to encourage more people to come back to your blog.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah, and it allows you to stay in contact and kind of keep your brand at the front of their mind.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, so you know, controlling the content forever and just making it your own hub, we talked to a lot of clients about this and other people we've talked to, when you control your website and your content and your email list and you have this central core you control, then you can go use any platform that pops up anytime. Whether it's Facebook, Snapchat, whatever it is, you have this core of marketing material that you control and then you use these other platforms and tools but you're not reliant on them for your business.

Mirela Setkic:

Exactly, and essentially you have more control over your destiny.

Jake Braun:

Yeah. That's a good place to be.

Mirela Setkic:

Right, that's where we're all trying to be and I guess we should now talk about the ROI and what can people expect. Like, how long does it take and all of that good stuff that everyone wants to know.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, number seven, it takes time and effort to achieve a positive ROI.

Mirela Setkic:

Yes.

Jake Braun:

You know, blogging's really easy in the sense that it's easy to do. Anyone can write a post.

Mirela Setkic:

Right.

Jake Braun:

And put it out there. You can get a free website, you can post stuff on there. We don't recommend that, we recommend that you have a website that looks nice and has all that stuff that we've talked about previously and then, you write good content.
You put in the effort to write something that people are actually going to want to read and that's the difficult part in a sense. Producing quality content that people want to read. Doing the research to get that unique idea or crafting your own spin on an idea that's already been out there, whether it's talking about it in terms of your industry or whatever your life story or business story adds to that idea. That takes time, whether it's you doing it or whether you have an employee doing it or whether you have to hire a freelance writer and either with employees or freelance writers, you're going to have to pay more money for the higher quality, so that's where it's going to be an investment in your part to make that happen.
So, that means you have to dedicate time and money to it and in terms of how long it can take, it can take months or even years, especially if you're a new business and your goal is SEO or branding, it's going to take time for the results to accumulate for people to recognize you as an authority, for Google to recognize you as an authority and to move you up higher organically. So, it's a little bit easier if you have an established business, you have a customer list that you can start sending these blog posts to then you can take more of an immediate advantage of the posts you write but for a new business, it's going to take time and you're going to have to willing to go the long haul if you want it to work for SEO and for branding purposes.

Mirela Setkic:

And that also depends how competitive-

Jake Braun:

Yes.

Mirela Setkic:

Your industry or your space is. If you have ten other people who are operating in your industry and they are like blogging beasts and they're just putting out content and doing all this stuff, it's going to take you a little bit longer to actually surpass them but if you are in an industry where there are no blogging beasts and everyone is kind of you know, laying low, then you can get ahead fairly faster.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, if you're in law or marketing-

Mirela Setkic:

Oh yeah, well that's just like competitive industry times twenty.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, it's expensive. There's people who are spending tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on that industry. So it really does depend a lot.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah but that doesn't mean that you should not blog.

Jake Braun:

No.

Mirela Setkic:

Like someone can still end up on your website and your blog post can convince them that you are the right law firm to hire just because you're blog post is now going to show up in the Google snippet type of thing, doesn't mean that you shouldn't be writing blog posts.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, you just need to be more realistic depending on what industry you're in. You might have to do a little bit of research or talk to someone about how much work does have to be done in this industry to rank higher or just focus on the other stuff that you can get out of it. Share it on your social media, use your blog post to convince existing customers to buy additional products-

Mirela Setkic:

Oh yeah, that's the other thing, convincing existing people that hey I'm still here, come back and buy from me.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, you don't want people to forget about you.

Mirela Setkic:

That's true.

Jake Braun:

Is there anything else that we should of told people about blogging?

Mirela Setkic:

No, nothing, it can be a struggle, it's sometimes a struggle for myself because I'm often in my head and I'm rereading what I wrote and I think that I need to be Mark Twain of fricking writing blog posts and then I have to snap back and remind myself, no, just write the way you're thinking and just put it out there and stop perfecting it.

Jake Braun:

Get it out there. There's going to be mistakes.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah.

Jake Braun:

There's always mistakes.

Mirela Setkic:

Yeah just get it out.

Jake Braun:

Published books have mistakes and then you can't avoid mistakes.

Mirela Setkic:

Exactly and I mean, but I'm not saying don't check your grammar-

Jake Braun:

Well yeah, of course.

Mirela Setkic:

You should and make sure that is has a good flow and all of that stuff but it doesn't have to be an award winning novel or any of that stuff.

Jake Braun:

Yeah, better to be good and on time than perfect and late.

Mirela Setkic:

That's right, so I think that's all I have.

Jake Braun:

It’s been a great 25th episode. And definitely, do feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or comments about anything we talked about today or marketing in general. You can visit us on our website, KickinItWithKapok.com, or on social media. We're on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as Kapok Marketing.
This has been Kickin’ it with Kapok brought to you by Kapok Marketing. Thanks for listening. We’ll have something just as great for you next time.