Yes, you should have a blog. At this point, it’s just the bare minimum. The best thing about a blog is that you write it once, put it out, and it will be out there pulling in organic traffic two or three years down the line.

Why have a blog?

There are several reasons but the biggest reason to have a blog is to drive traffic to your site. Even your dedicated customers are probably not going to read your blog updates regularly like we all used to do in 2005. The internet has far too many distractions these days. But that shouldn’t have you quitting in defeat. Most blog traffic these days comes from search engines.

If Joanna searches for the best way to pair sweaters and scarves and your blog ranks as one of the top search results, that’s one person visiting your site who may never have heard of you otherwise.

Now, couple that with the fact that 8.5 billion Google searches are made in a day. Even if only 0.1% percent of searches involve your niche and come from your general geographical area, that’s still millions of potential visits to your site. This is what blogs are for. They help catch the attention of those searchers and drive traffic to your site.

What to put in your blog

Only put valuable information in your blog posts. The easiest way to do this is to answer a question— preferably one that hasn’t been answered adequately by others or not answered at all. Find the most asked question in your niche and answer it adequately with a blog post.

Optimize for SEO

This has to be one of the most important things you can do. All the work and resources put into your blog won’t matter much if no one reads it. That’s why you have to optimize it for SEO. Your goal should be to rank on the first page of Google.

The best way to rank at the top is by targeting keywords with low competition. If you target a keyword that sees millions of search queries in a day, you may not rank anywhere near the first page because Google tends to favor sites with greater perceived authority for top rankings.

If something is being searched for 10 million times a day, several big sites with greater name recognition than you’ll probably ever have almost certainly written something about it. No matter how good your post is, you will have a hard time outranking them.

It’s easier to rank first when you target a low-competition keyword. A couple of thousand searches per term may not be much but when you target several of those with separate blog posts over time, those numbers start adding up to something truly impressive.

And the best part about it is that the more traffic you pull in, the more your perceived authority on a subject will grow and thus the easier it will be to pull in more traffic.

Put a CTA in your blog posts

At the end of the day, your blog is just a tool to bring in more visitors but if you don’t try converting those visitors into customers, they won’t be. That’s why you should put a CTA at the lower bottom or the very end of your blog post.

The CTA should be relevant to the topic covered in the blog so it doesn’t come across as too salesy. You want to provide genuine value in your blog post and then try to make a sale or get an email signup once that value has been provided.

If your blog discusses how to match sweaters and scarves, then encouraging the reader to buy the sweaters and scarves featured in the blog will perform better than encouraging them to buy a pair of heels or something unrelated.