A blog on the importance of blogging
As I’ve said on plenty of podcasts after publishing my second book, I felt I was the only person talking about blogging. And maybe I was!
It wasn’t until I had a complimentary coaching session (shoutout to Bryn Bamber) that I realized most of my author clients were coming from people just finding me online—not the videos I’d been posting since 2020. Even the folks who came from social media did so through Facebook groups, not from me doing almost six years of video posting.
I wanted to cry!
Bryn helped me realize that I just needed to shift my efforts—and spend some time analyzing where my clients were coming from, something I already do quarterly but paid little attention to with my own content strategy.
First, I went from posting weekly blogs to doing six per month, and now I’m up to 8 blogs/month. And I’m still doing videos, but all the videos are bringing attention to my blogs.
Might I run out of topics to potentially blog about? Maybe. But until then, I’m going to maintain the twice per week frequency for as long as possible. Here are 3 reasons why blogs still rule with visibility, even though it’s all text:
1. Blogs add content to a website
People don’t understand how websites get on page 1 of Google or how results just show up on AI, but SEO (search engine optimization) isn’t rocket science. The more a website contains the keywords that people search for or has traffic going to it, the higher Google ranks it (there are other factors to its algorithm, but these are some of the top ones).
So the more you blog, the more content you add to your website, the hire it ranks. Now, I’m not always ranking for the things I want to (some of my top blog posts are on self-publishing and about my time in Transcendental Meditation), but if you keep blogging consistently and frequently, chances are Google will bump you up.
The same goes for AI. Every app has its own algorithm (I sometimes call it Google 3 years ago because it can be horrible at being accurate at present) but again, the more you blog, the more it recognizes the authority your website has, and hopefully you have.
2. It gives long-form content a home.
I often hear, “What am I going to blog about?” from people when the topic of blogs comes up. People think blogs are diary entries. They can be, but they don’t have to be.
Unless you run an ecommerce company with dozens of products, you might not have a reason to have a lot of pages on your site. So a blog post is where long-form content that doesn’t warrant its own webpage can live. This can include:
- News announcements
- News releases (yes, that same document you email to media)
- Interviews (yes, transcribing that audio podcast you were on is helpful)
- Talks (same as above, but for your own talks)
- Lists (I created one for all the places to network with other vegans online)
- Essays or articles
Anything longer than 250 words (one paragraph) can be a blog post.
3. It helps you expand on short videos or other short-form content.
If, unlike me, you are getting good traction on your 90-seconds-or-less videos on social media but your SEO or AI presence sucks, it’s time to repurpose.
Did you notice I already shared this information on LinkedIn or in an Instagram carousel on July 28? Well, that’s what I’m doing now.
I did a carousel with these 3 reasons, and now I’m expanding on each of those 3 reasons in this blog post.
In 2023, I started tracking all the topics I was doing videos on, and what I should have done simultaneously is also turn those videos into 1) carousels and 2) blog posts. You can even go a step further and add emails to the mix.
It took me six years to develop a proper content marketing system for myself, despite giving these strategies to my clients! So don’t be late to the content party like me and start tracking all the topics you can talk about on your blog now that you’ve already shared about on social media.
I’m Sandra Nomoto, a personal brand manager for established ethical female leaders. Contact me if you need someone to manage and amplify your brand for the next 20 years. Or sign-up to my email list to get monthly whispers in your inbox.
