At least the title of this article seems to say so. Actually you can say the same with content marketing: is content marketing waste of time?
Okay, I’m going into a loop – is most driving waste of time? Is most reading waste of time? Is most physical work waste of time? Is most studying waste of time?
I personally believe that an activity is rarely a waste of time. The thing that decides whether it’s a waste of time or not is the end result that you achieve. Whether a particular business promotion activity (for that matter, even an enterprise) bears results or not depends on its implementation, execution and targeting. The same is the case with blogging, whether you indulge in personal blogging or business blogging.
There are many businesses that are doing great with the help of their blog. Most of my business comes due to blogging. Yes, it is time consuming and I would rather have an activity that gets me targeted traffic without having to blog every day, but for now, blogging gets the business. The more I blog, the more business I get, the less I blog, the less business I get.
I have observed that with more blogging I get more targeted traffic. It’s not that my clients give me more business because they can see me blogging everyday. It’s because my visibility increases and more people come to know of my services whether my search engine rankings are improving, new blog posts and webpages are continuously being added to the search engine index or more people are having more content from me to share on social media and social networking websites. Whatever is the case, ultimately, I experience an improvement when a blog more. So at a personal level I can never say that blogging is waste of time.
In a blog post titled Why every business should blog Neil Patel shares the following statistics regarding business blogging:
- 61% of consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post that they read.
- 60% of consumers feel positive about a company after reading its blog.
- 70% consumers learn about a company through its blog vs ads.
According to an infographic shared on the same page, websites that blog have 97% more inbound links. Websites that regularly blog have 434% more indexed pages compared to websites that don’t.
Is blogging good for your business? It depends on your targeting, your intention, and your seriousness. Please don’t think that I’m trying to preach, but most business blogging ventures fail because people are not persistent. The problem is not with blogging, the problem is with commitment. Business blogging requires serious commitment, whether it comes directly from you (you writing the blog regularly) or it comes from someone you have hired. Persistence is the key.