Chances are that you’re paying other professionals to write all, or at least a big portion, of your content.
It’s easier said than done to block off free time and sit down to write articles for your business. And you might as well stick with what you’re good at, right?
But what if I told you that writing articles yourself could bring your business to a whole other level and potentially increase your value as a professional?
I have only been writing for a very short period of time, but the amount of growth I have experienced through consistent writing has been phenomenal.
In this article, I’ll give you a couple of insights that I gained from writing. It might even make you consider starting your own blog or getting involved with your current content writers.
1. It gives you a greater understanding of your customers
When you start generating ideas for articles, you’ll quickly realize that is nearly impossible to come up with topics out of thin air.
You could write about anything you want. And we both know that anything means nothing at all.
What are potential customers interested in?
To find a place to start from when writing, I advise you to hone into a specific industry or niche. It makes sense as an entrepreneur to write something related to what your business does or something you’re passionate about.
Now, Carly and I are people who are extremely eager to learn as much as we possibly can.
We are fortunate enough to do what we love for a living, so we write with the goal to learn about our industry and to gain expertise in our field.
This forced us to learn more about who our customers are. It’s the same concept when you are selling products or services. You have to get to know your audience in order to give them content or products they are interested in!
We had to ask ourselves a set of questions:
- What are their demographics (e.g. age, income or occupation)?
- What is their preferred way of communicating?
- On what platforms do they predominantly hang out? At what time?
- What are their interests?
- How do they behave?
- Why the hell would they work with us and not someone else?
Going through this process gives you so much insight into who you are writing for but also who you want to work with.
You go from wanting to work with any business that could use your service to having a specific buyer persona who would love to work with just you.
Marketing has become a lot easier since we started blogging.
2. You’ll gain online visibility
Great and relevant content is like candy for search engines 🍭.
The more valuable content you publish, the more authority you build and the higher you will rank in your customers’ search results.
Attracting customers with different goals
Say you have a small local shop in the Okanagan that sells specialty wines 🍷.
When you write articles that contain a bunch of keywords related to wine, you’ll automatically attract much more traffic to your website.
You might find yourself writing and learning about:
- best practices for organizing wine tasting events
- how fermented grapes can positively impact your health
- a guide to making wine in your basement
- or give an analysis on wines in a specific category
You name it!
This way you’re not only attracting potential wine buyers but also people who are simply interested in learning more about wine or other store owners that want to host events.
Mind you, don’t expect you can just copy content from other websites with great SEO scores and expect it to positively impact yours.
This actually gets you penalized. Modern web crawlers are extremely smart nowadays and can easily see if your content is unique or not.
3. It turns you into an industry expert
Writing in itself is only half of the work. The other half is researching and finding external sources of information. You might have to read other articles, industry news and engage in other blog forums.
I’ll be honest with you, when I started this blog I had no clue about the very existence of half of the topics I have written about so far 🤷🏽♂️.
And it’s rewarding to learn about your own industry at this level because I have broadened my horizon and can now much better serve our clients.
It’s competitive research
As a bonus, you’ll start building a greater awareness of your competitive landscape which can serve as a healthy source of inspiration.
It also puts you in a better position to move your business in the right direction and stay with the times.
Learning extensively about your industry and sharing your insights with the world puts you in an expert position.
Your readers will potentially even start seeing you as an authoritative person they can turn to when they seek advice or outsource work to.
It builds trust
On top of all of the above, your customers will develop a relationship with you even if they haven’t met you in person. They get to know you through your writing and how you articulate your ideas.
Customers start to put a face behind your brand, which brings me to my next point →
4. It makes you more familiar with your own brand
You built this brand or at least helped shape it.
Getting involved with content creation for your company and being in the driver’s seat helps you to actually get to know your brand at a much deeper level.
A picture of how your brand is being perceived starts to form and this is a huge advantage over business owners who are completely disconnected from this process.
They tend to become separated from their brand over time.
With the insights you obtain from writing, you can adjust your brand messaging appropriately and inject more of your own personality into the content you feed to your customers.
5. You’ll build a growth mindset
Oh my god, growth!
What can entrepreneurs and leaders do without it? It is such an indispensable component in running a business that it’s simply impossible not to have it if you’re aiming for success.
What is a growth mindset?
A growth mindset is a belief that you can become smarter, more talented and ultimately achieve more. You understand that it takes effort and perseverance to become a great entrepreneur.
A fixed mindset on the other hand is the belief that you have limited potential. You do what you do and you do it well. Learning anything new? Hell no! Why would I?
A healthy relationship with failure
Writing makes you realize that there is so much you don’t know! And you never really will.
Believe it or not, It actually gives you peace of mind knowing this.
It motivates you to innovate, constantly create and experiment. You learn how to build a healthy relationship with failure and how to embrace it.
After all, you have to take risks and try different strategies to expect different outcomes.
Conclusion
I recognize that you have enough on your plate as an entrepreneur and you won’t have the time to tackle your company’s entire content strategy.
It’s okay to hire professionals to help you with content creation. But just being partially involved gives you enough control to ensure your business is being perceived the way you want it to be perceived.