9 Reasons Why You Should Have a Blog For Your Business

Blogging may not seem like it would be super helpful in building your business. After all, if you don’t have a big following for your online business yet, what good is a blog gonna do, right? But actually, having a blog for your online business, or business in general, can help build that audience in multiple ways. Here are 9 reasons why you should have a blog for your business, and what it can do for you.

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1. Keeps people updated

Question: if a new product drops and nobody is around to see it, does it make a sale?

Even if you have a solid following, unless they’re checking your shop every day, they might miss news about products that have been added or products that will be disappearing soon. A blog is a great way to update people (on new products, upcoming promotions, your own art, etc.) in more than just 140 characters, and gives you the flexibility to post as many pictures and gifs of the process, product, lifestyle photography, etc. as your heart desires. For a great example of this, check out Zen Pencils’ blog

Don’t have a shop to advertise yet? Sign up for an Artist Shop – it’s free and easy to create!

2. Gives customers something shareworthy

It’s a lot easier to get people to share cool blog content they’re interested in reading than it is to get them to hit that “Share on Twitter” button in your shop to share a product. A blog gives you an opportunity to post content that people in your niche audience will be interested in reading, sharing, and coming back to regularly. This gives you exposure and grows your audience without blatantly marketing yourself, which is good because according to the 80/20 rule, just 20% of your content should be self-promotion. There are endless ways you can create content; you can even write about having an e-commerce site, which both appeals to an audience trying to get into this as well as giving you a way to talk about your shop without directly selling it in people’s faces.   

Urban Outfitters’ blog is a great example of a blog that gives you shareable, rad content you can get addictedly lost in.

Why You Should Have A Blog For Your Business

3. a blog Helps drive traffic to your site

Having a blog can improve your SEO and basically make you more findable in the world wide internet. According to hubspot, whenever you post something new on your blog, you’re basically telling Google, “hey, I’m an active site, y’all should probably up me in the search ranks.” Because a more active site moves up higher in search rankings. And if your blog gets increased visibility, it’ll make finding your shop easier as well through the blog. It all connects!

Having other people link to your content as well (people sharing your work and linking to it in their own work) boosts your SEO and your spot in the search engines, thus driving more traffic to you.

4. A blog is a hub for your brand

Utilizing social media is important to build your audience and customer base. But having a Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr account, for example, is a lot of moving parts. A blog provides a home for links to all your social media, your online shop, information about you, links to any other projects you’re doing, etc. It’s a great way to keep the brand extra consistent by bringing everything together in one place.

5. Long term exposure

A tweet or Instagram post can get really popular when it’s first posted. But as time goes on, it becomes harder to find and, on these oh-so “in the moment” social media outlets, posts get lost to time and fading relevance.

Blog posts, however, can keep gaining traction. If you post a blog post that gets a good amount of views in the first few days, basically search engines will recognize it as a post that did well and will have it higher in search rankings. It will be easier to find and can gain popularity as time goes on, especially “evergreen” posts, or posts that are lasting and don’t fall out of popularity or relevance.

6. Create art specifically for your blog posts

In addition to creating shareable blog posts, use custom illustrations for the featured images and illustrations throughout your posts. A really appealing piece of art can totally make a post all the more intriguing and click-worthy. Get people interested in your art because they saw a post first (foot in the door), then let them discover your shop naturally through that rather than trying to convince them to buy something right off the bat. Look at the illustrations we have on our blog by Katie Lukes! They make our content look great and, in turn, give her exposure as well. 

Why You Should Have A Blog For Your Business

7. Guest blog or team up with someone

When you write a guest blog post for another blog in your niche’s interest, not only is it exposure for you on their blog – you get to tap into their audience as well if they share the post through their channels.

Similarly if you do, say, an interview with someone in your niche’s interest on your blog, not only will people searching their name be able to find your blog post (not to mention, people in your niche will want to share it if it’s a cool interview), but if the interviewee pushes it through their social channels, you get the added benefit of getting exposure with their audience.

8. it Acts as a portfolio

Posting blog posts featuring art you do for fun or for projects separate from your shop is a great way to promote your art and style without trying to sell it. Just doing a cool post about the process art for a design in your shop, or doing an “August sketch roundup” type post is a great way of getting people to fall in love with your art without the whole “they’re trying to sell me something” elephant in the room.

9. a blog Puts a personality to your brand

Having a blog and a longer-form way of writing posts gets your personality across better than 140 characters and hashtags can. People get to know you and your cool art rather than just seeing you as a living ad.

10. It’s fun!

Says the blog writer. Admittedly, I’m a little biased on this one. But really, there are so many different things you can do with a blog. There’s a reason most retailers and clothing labels, from Threadless, to Urban Outfitters, to independent artists, have a blog accompanying their site. Jac Vanek, for example, became a successful clothing designer in part because she had a lifestyle blog that gained some serious traction. So it can be a super valuable tool in multiple ways.

Just a Few Blog Platform Suggestions:

  • WordPress: Super customizable. Can be a little tricky to get really good at but overall, its super easy to use. Plus it’s pretty easy to connect with other WP blogs.
  • Squarespace: If youve ever listened to a podcast, most of them have advertised Squarespace at least once
  • Blogger: one of the basics, can’t go wrong, pretty easy to connect with other blogs.
  • Medium: If you want to focus more on having marketing and design-specific posts, Medium can be a good place to post those, especially if they’re image-based (it’s a beautiful platform for images). If you comment regularly on other posts too, you can grow an audience relatively easily, because it’s so contained. 
  • Tumblr: Personally, I dont recommend it as a blogging platform. I recommend it for image-based platform. But hey, it’s supercrazy simple.

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We’re an artist community built on the power of helping each other succeed — if you’re reading this and have tips of your own to share, please do so in the comments! Thank you!

Illustration done by the fantastic Katie Lukes

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