Why You Should Keep Blogging (Even When it Feels Like No One is Reading)

The other day I came across a figure that stated that a new blog is created somewhere in the world every half a second. (Source: BWHGeek)
 
I'll give you a minute to wrap your head around that.
 
(One minute later.)
 
It's no secret that the competition is fierce, but giving up on your blog because of low readership means giving away opportunities.

Rather than look at your slim subscriber list from a "glass half empty" perspective, consider how lucky you are to have earned their attention despite the overwhelming competition. 
 
Maybe people aren't flocking to your posts like you envisioned in your dreams, but if you keep at it, the rewards are sweet. 
 
So before you close shop, consider the following reasons why you should keep on blogging on. 

Practice makes perfect

Much like any new venture – cooking, driving, bookshelf assembly – you're bound to run into some hindrances. 

Blogging is no different. 

Sure, you may think that you know how to write. You've written countless college papers, emails, and letters home from camp but this experience perils in comparison to the skills necessary to write strategically for your ideal audience. 

Identifying your audience, establishing your tone, and finding your groove are things that take shape over time. 

To improve, you have no choice but to keep at it (no matter how many views you're getting.)

In any business, credibility is key to warming up prospects to a point where they feel comfortable buying into your product or service. The more you blog, the more opportunity you have to build up your credibility in the eyes of potential customers and industry influencers. 

Quick tip: Commit to writing something every day. This can be a blog post or quick writing exercise. Much like going to the gym, writing can be difficult to pick back up if you leave too much time and space between each piece. For quick creative writing prompts, check out the app, Prompts. While the topics aren't business specific per say, they certainly help to get the gears turning. 

The SEO benefits are unparalleled

Every time you publish a blog post, it serves as an indexable page for your business. The more indexed pages you have, the more your site gets crawled by Google's bots.

According to HubSpot, companies with 51 to 100 pages generate 48% more traffic than companies with 1 to 50 pages and companies that have reached 101 to 200 pages generate 2.5x more leads than those with 50 or fewer pages. 

Quite simply, each post matters. 

Not to mention, the more your master the art of writing informative, inspiring blog posts, the more opportunity you have for your articles to be picked up and linked in other publications. 

In fact, companies that blog have 97% more inbound links.

Aware that inbound links go into determining your page rank, this could have a serious impact on your organic traffic. 

However, be sure that you're focused on building links the right way. Google is quick to penalize sites that gain links at an unnatural pace or practice bad link building habits.

Quick tip: Don't allow optimization to be an after thought. Start by researching questions that are being asked by your prospects. What they are struggling with? Your post should aim to provide a solution to their pain point. From here you can focus on identifying a target keyword, preferably a long tail one, as they are easier to rank for. As you write, be sure to incorporate this keyword into your title, body, meta description, alt text, and URL. 

Your sales team will benefit from it

In your darkest blogging hour, think about sales. 

A steady stream of quality content will provide your sales representatives with proof of your business' industry expertise. 

The more awesome, actionable, problem-solving content you create, the easier it is for sales to pass along resources and warm prospects up to doing business with you. 

If you have potential customers stuck in your funnel that aren't quite ready to take the plunge, your content could be the driving force that propels their decision-making. 

Quick tip: When time permits, sit in on a few sales calls. Hearing prospects talk candidly about the issues they're facing will make it easier for you to truly understand who you are trying to reach through your content. If you discover that people are constantly struggling with a particular pain point, bring it back to your team and start building out a remedy.