Gaining Traction with Content: Why Blogging About Your Personalization Business Will Put You on the Map

When the success of your business is rooted in growing sales and keeping your customers happy, there’s always more that you can do to market your services and grow your reach. The improvements that have been made with concepts like brand-specific apps, social media, remarketing advertising, and email marketing allow customers and businesses to stay more connected than ever – but that doesn’t mean efforts like creating long-form content or giving blogging a try should be overlooked.

In fact, blogging is a prime way for growing businesses to increase the amount of leads they generate. On a more cognitive level, it’s a simple concept: humans are a curious species – we crave information. When something interests us, we want to know more. When someone else has figured out how to do something we ourselves want to do, we want to know more. So when you provide content that offers the answer to a question, makes sense of a complicated subject or gives the audience insight on how to fix a problem that is familiar to them, you are establishing yourself as an expert – an expert with solutions. Solutions attract people and keep them coming back for more information later. So why not give that knowledge away?

Blogging with the intention of keeping your audience informed, educated or entertained is only the tip of the content creation iceberg – here’s a few more reasons why blogging for your small business is a must:

It drives traffic to your website and impacts your business’ search engine ranking.

Blogging equals more website content, and more website content equals a better search engine grade. When you add fresh content to your website, Google and other search engines take notice of your activity – they are programmed to provide the latest and greatest search results with the goal of sending folks to websites that are updated and maintained frequently. Every time you publish a post on your blog, you are adding another indexed page on your website. This action alone improves your site’s SEO and produces more opportunities for your business to pop up in organic searches. Ensuring your business is discoverable online is a major key – if not the biggest key – to increasing sales and widening your customer base. Maintaining a blog on your company website is one incredibly easy way to routinely update your website and make certain that you’re keeping search engines happy.

When creating content, it’s best to naturally use keywords that are pertinent to your business or that you know your customers are already typing into the search bar. That being said – keep in mind that Google is going to know if you cheat. Avoid keyword stuffing. Not only will it put your site at risk for punishment by popular search engines (which can negatively impact your SEO ranking), but it can cause your audience to disengage with your content. Because who wants to read a post with no substance that uses the same words over and over? Nobody. Write about helpful or entertaining topics that you know your readers will genuinely enjoy – this will make it easier for you to share links to your blog on social media and guarantee their success (which will increase your website’s traffic, too).

It provides you with social media content and allows for adequate lead generation.

Instead of coming up with unique social posts for every platform every day of the week (or paying someone else to do it for you), blogging provides you with the freedom to share and re-share links to your blog posts (which point directly to your website) on your social channels. If you’ve written a few evergreen blog posts that are always relevant, plan to share them several times during the upcoming months. Remember that when you are sharing your links on social media, you are both leading people to your website and also inviting the folks in your audience to like and share these links, which can increase your company’s reach and put your business in front of demographics you may not be tackling with your other marketing efforts.

When you share links to your blog, you’ll want to do what you can to take advantage of the new traffic your content is driving to your site and capture any potential leads. Create a pop-up that invites your readers to sign up for your email list. Remind them they can subscribe to your monthly newsletter to stay updated on any new products or news you have to offer. Further incentivize them to leave you with their contact information by offering a one-time reward or discount they can use the next time they order. Whatever you end up blogging about, don’t overlook the chance to touch base with the new visitors your blog is bringing in.

It showcases the personality of your business and gives your readers insight on what drives the company.

Blogging is a creative way to give the public a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on at your shop. Two major things are accomplished here: your audience gets to know the voice and style of your business, and you get the opportunity to shed some light on the subjects and principles that your company holds near and dear. It’s perfectly fine to post about new products or sales that you are running, but that shouldn’t be the only thing you blog about because let’s be honest – it’s not going to capture very many people.

No one is going online to just purchase products from you – remember, humans are curious and they want to learn.  Share the results of your latest community outreach effort. Publish interesting and interactive T-shirt upcycling how-to’s for customers to try out at home. Recognize that your blog should be distinctive to you – give it the attention it deserves and use it as a tool to convey the personality of your business, your brand, and your company mission. No matter the size of your business or the types of services you offer, blogging provides an effective way for folks to tap directly into your company’s lifeline and take a peek at what’s going on under the hood.

It establishes you as an industry expert and an authority figure.

What questions do your customers already have? Do you feel as though you’re responding to the same email or replying to the same request daily? Is there something you could create or write down that might help ensure that your customers are on the same page as you?

When it comes to what you do and what services you provide, your clients look to you for advice. If they already knew the right answers, they’d be personalizing items themselves. Position yourself two steps ahead of them – assert yourself as an industry expert and recognize what they are going to need to know before they have the chance to ask.

Take note of the customer questions that arise often.

What are the best garments to have personalized for [X] event?

How do I keep my custom T-shirts from fading in the wash?

What are some tips for taking group orders or creating a successful fundraiser?

Creating helpful content that offers your customers answers and shows you’re invested in their needs keeps your customers coming back to you – because you have solutions. It reaffirms that they can trust you. It gives them confidence in your business. They remember you and keep you on top of mind, as they already know that they can count on you for the information they need. Of course, the other great advantage of writing out responses to common questions and publishing them on your blog is it saves you time when the same questions come up later – never again will you find yourself exasperated trying to re-explain your production process or how printing works when you can simply email a link to your blog over to the customer.