If you want to get people to visit your building company website and win some new clients then writing a blog is a pretty solid strategy. Think of a blog as an online journal where you can share your thoughts, knowledge, news, and any other bits of information your clients might find useful. In this article we’ll talk about the pros and cons of having a blog on your building company website which will help you decide if having a blog is right for your and your business.
The number one reason why most small business websites run a blog is because they know that having an active blog will give you more visitors to your site, and generally speaking the more visitors you get the more jobs you can expect. This works because every new blog post you add to your site shows Google that your site is a wealth of information on your chosen industry and is then more likely to show it in the search results.
You could say that your blog is mostly written for the benefit of Google instead of real humans because your visitors are unlikely to read every single thing in your blog, in reality they’ll just give it a glance and maybe click on one or two items before making a decision to get in touch.
Even if visitors just take a quick look at your blog it has the power to give a positive first impression of your business which can make all the difference between them finding someone else or picking up the phone. A company blog shows that you’re actively running your business and gives the impression that you’re popular enough to justify writing about it regularly.
I’m not suggesting that having a blog will gurantee that your phone starts ringing off the hook with new customers, but it can certainly help get the edge over your competition and sometimes that’s all you need.
Even if you are the most experienced, most knowledgable, most skilled, and undisputed boss of your industry, I can personally guarantee you that it takes way longer than you expect to write a good blog post. Especially if that blog post is attractive to visitors, interesting to read, and bags you a bunch of SEO brownie points to scoop up more local business.
For this reason many tradesman and construction company owners outsource the writing of their blogs to professional copywriters, you just send them a topic or an idea and they’ll do the rest. Good copywriters don’t come cheap though so be prepared to consider each blog like an investment instead of an expense.
When you start blogging for your business you’ll probably have a stack of ideas but after a while many people find themselves struggling to find things to write about. Soon in can be just as much of a task to decide on the topic of your next blog post as it is to actually write the thing, and you have to go through with this every week or however often you’ve decided to post your blogs.
Hiring a professional copywriter can help with generating new ideas for your blogs but not always, and especially if they don’t know your industry. You should make sure you have a big list of stuff to write about before you commit to writing a blog and be ready to add as many new topics as possible.
You know what looks worse to a customer than a website with no blog? A website with very few blog posts, all of which were written ages ago. Blogs are supposed to be updated and have new posts added to them regularly, that’s what your visitors will be expecting to see when they open yours, and if they see a nearly empty blog which hasn’t been touched in years they will assume you simply can’t be bothered to maintain it. This will certainly become a little “black mark” on your website for them, even if the reality is that you’ve been too busy delivering a great service to sit down and write.
If you are sure you want a blog for your website then you must commit to writing a new post regularly. Once a month is probably the longest you should ever leave between blog posts but posting every week or every other week is ideal. That’s a whole lot time spent writing so it’s no wonder why so many small business blogs fizzle out after a few weeks.
You can’t half arse your blog posts because if you do there is a good chance that spelling mistakes, typos or other sorts of errors will creep in there. And if a visitor happens to read a hastily written blog post they might assume that you will apply the same level of attention to their job.
I’m not saying that all your blog posts have to be worthy of a literary award (after all you’re a professional trademan, not a journalist) just that they do need to be of reasonably quality because they have the potential to be a massive turn off for potential customers if they are badly written. If you do want to write some blog posts I suggest you hire someone to proof read your work and take care of any errors, or at least get someone else to eyeball them before you make them live.
If you can spare the time and expense required to write good quality blogs and keep them comming each and every week (or month or whatever) then you should give it a go and reap the benefits of extra traffic to your site hopefully leading to more quotes and more jobs.
If you don’t have the time, writing skills, or budget required to run a blog then you should probably focus on other areas of your marketing instead.