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As a business, your most important goal is to sell your products to customers. But, how do you attract customers to your products or services? You do this by producing valuable and engaging content. What are some good examples of valuable engaging content? Blogging and podcasting, of course! Now it depends on whether you should do blogging, podcasting, or both?
Blogging and podcasting are great ways to talk about your business and your products. The important question is determining which form of content your business should use. Both blogging and podcasting have their uses, so let us dive right in shall we?
5 Reasons to Start a Blog
Blogging is one of the most popular ways to engage your audience! Here are 5 reasons why you should start a blog.
- Starting a Blog is Pretty Easy: To start your blog, all you need is a desktop computer or laptop, a website editor, and some general knowledge of the English language. From there, you should be set! Anybody today can start their own blog and it could be about a variety of topics!
- Blogs Can Engage Your Target Audience: Blogs, when written correctly, can be very engaging and valuable to the reader. Many people who read blogs are in the consideration stage of their buyer’s journey. In this stage, they want to be as informed and educated about their problem as possible.
- Blogs Help Build Rapport With Your Audience: Of course, by providing your audience with content that is valuable and engaging, you also help nurture that new relationship you’ve built with them. They find you more trustworthy as you’ve educated them more about their problem and provided them with some possible solutions to resolve it.
- Your Blog Can Create New Opportunities: Once you’ve informed your audience about the problem, you can provide them with solutions that they can capitalize on. This presents your business with new opportunities that you can hopefully turn into conversions. More conversions equal more revenue, which can lead to more growth for your business.
- Validates Your Expertise: With a blog, you will want to make sure you know what you are writing about. Consistently writing blogs that people recommend to others will increase your validation with people. Think of it as free marketing. The more valuable blogs you write, the more people will start going to your business for help in their efforts.
5 Reasons to Start a Podcast
A podcast is another form of engaging content you can use to talk about your business and products. It is more of an auditory alternative to blogging and in some cases, provides a visual experience. Some people might prefer hearing about your business instead of reading about it. Here are 5 reasons for you to start a podcast.
- Podcasts Can Help You Reach Out To A Broader Audience: Podcasts can help you reach out to an audience that, without it, you wouldn’t be able to reach. You might have a certain group of people who want to get to know more about your business, and podcasting might prove to be the best option for them.
- Podcasts Require Little Commitment: Just like blogs, podcasts don’t require you to send out a new podcast every few days. Plus, podcasts don’t always have to run an hour (JRE). You can create simple informative podcasts in 10-30 minutes instead of 60 plus minutes. Just make sure your content is relevant and valuable.
- Podcasts Can Help You Stand Out: Unlike blogs, podcasts still aren’t widely used by most businesses. This can help you break into a certain niche that you otherwise would not have been able to break into.
- Podcasts Are Best When Used With the Right Idea and Message: For example, you don’t want to create a podcast where all you talk about is cooking when you’re a marketing agency, right? Don’t neglect your audience by not creating content that is catered to them.
- Podcasts Help Develop Your Brand: Podcasts, with the right consistent posting and scheduling, can help develop your brand and nurture brand loyalty. You can stay on top of your customer’s minds with that consistent posting schedule. Plus, if your content is dang good, you can develop a loyal audience of podcast listeners, which can lead to possible conversions.
Attract and Engage The Right Audience
Whether you are writing a blog or recording a podcast, you will want to make sure that they attract and engage the right audience. Think about it like this. You are a fitness business and one of the topics that you are talking about on your podcast is, “How to properly watch TV.” First of all, that topic is ridiculous, and second of all, it isn’t relevant to that business’s audience.
Defining who is your target audience can help you create content that is catered more to them. Your target audience will be more engaged with your content and likely engage with your business even more.
Are There Any Challenges to Blogging or Podcasting?
When it comes to producing content, there are always different challenges, especially at the beginning stages. This also applies to both blogging and podcasting. While they both are easy to start, it can be difficult to know where to start.
Blogging
Finding the Right Topic: Finding the right topic for your blog can be quite a challenge. Keep your topics mindful and intentional to your target audience.
Consistent Quality Content: When you’re writing blogs on a daily or weekly basis, you may find that some of them are much better quality than others. There might be a lack of consistency with your blogs and you might find that you have some writer’s block as well. To counteract this, you can read other blogs that people enjoy reading and see how they structure their writing. From there, you can take pieces of their structure and writing process and implement them into your blogging process in the future.
Little To No Traffic: At the beginning of your blogging venture, you may not have much traffic. It can be very demotivating and dissuade you from continuing to blog going forward. What you have to remember is consistency is key. In due time, your reader count will go up which can lead to more recognition!
Getting More Engagement: Getting your readers to engage with your blog can be a bit difficult at first. You might notice that you aren’t getting much feedback from your readers and you have no way to properly gauge if your content is reaching them or resonating with them. One solution to this is to start including some call-to-actions on your blog. Internal links and external links are both great ways to encourage engagement on your blogs.
Podcasting
First-Time Jitters: Just like anything else you do the first time, podcasting might take some work to do. Your microphone might not work. Your recording device isn’t picking up audio. The podcast isn’t flowing smoothly as you’d hope. All of these are perfectly acceptable when you are new to podcasting. You might not get it right the first time, but you can dang sure improve on it.
Developing a Schedule: As a business, you probably have a lot of different things going on throughout your day. If you decide to start your podcast, you might have some trouble early on trying to schedule them throughout the month. You might have to start slowly and coordinate with your team. Once you have that structure figured out, you will be well on your way to consistently producing podcasts.
Gaining a Loyal Following: Podcasting is just like social media in that you have to develop your following over time. It’s not going to happen after you release your first podcast. (Although, that’d be really nice, right?) You need to make sure that the podcasts are relevant to your target audience to nurture and grow that follower count over time.
There is always going to be a challenge no matter how long you’ve been blogging or podcasting. Just know that there are different ways you can go about resolving these challenges, that way you can get past them and reach your potential.
Find The Right Fit
So should you do blogging? Fortunately, you don’t have to pick just one or the other, you can start producing both! It all depends on what fits your needs more. Is your target audience more interested in blogs? Then you should do blogging. Do they prefer to listen to audio on the way to work? Then, you should create a podcast!
Your content, no matter the format, will always provide some value to your audience.
Are you looking for help in marketing your business? Then you should contact us here so we can take the first steps in helping your business!