As a maker trying to sell your handmade products online you’ve probably looked into opening a blog alongside your handmade shop.
Is this something for you? Is it valuable? Is blogging dead?
Today we’re looking into pros and cons of blogging for your handmade business.
I know it sounds weird but think about it. When was the last time you’ve asked yourself: “what am I going to share on my Facebook page this week?” or thought: “what I’m going to talk about in my Instagram caption this weekend?” or “why would I start an email newsletter? I have no idea what to send out to people. I have nothing to tell them and I’m not just constantly going to tell them to come and visit my shop!”?
Well, blog fixes those issues for you because it gives you a content plan, meaning that every week you have something new to share to your audience that’s valuable to them (that’s key!). That way you can get them to visit your shop again and come back to your website or to your blog. That’s why blogging is great for that because it actually makes your marketing much easier because you have content to share and something to talk about on social media or in your email newsletter.
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Another reason blogging is great is because it gives you an opportunity to talk about your work, product, quality of your materials etc. It helps to build engagement and trust with your followers. It’s also a great way to tell your brand story so that when your followers are ready to buy they’re going to remember you and not the competition.
Blogging also helps you rank in search engines and who doesn’t want that? It’s important because every time you put a new article up on your blog you put keywords into it that Google or Yahoo or Bing or any other search engine is going to pick up. Then, when someone – your ideal customer – is looking for a particular product on Google, Google is much more likely to show them your page. Boom! That’s traffic you wouldn’t get if you weren’t blogging.
Blogging is also a great tool to help you build and grow that email list I’m always telling you should be working on. Blogging is key to that because if you give value to people through your blog articles they are going to want more of that. How do they do that? By giving you their email address to go on to your email list so that they get your newsletter. That’s why in every single blog post you should be promoting that newsletter so that you’re sure to grab that information and you can keep in touch with people even more easily and bring them back to your store.
There’s a mountain of reasons why you should be starting a blog but there are also a few cons and that’s what we’re going to look into now.
Blogging takes time. It will require a bit of time commitment to put that content every week or every couple weeks or even every month. But is it worth it? That’s the question you need to ask yourself. I personally believe it is because of all the reasons I gave you in the first part of this video. I do think blogging is an incredible tool that’s going to actually simplify your marketing strategy and just for that it’s worth the time that it takes. When you see something as being time-consuming really ask yourself: is it worth the rewards? In the days of blogging, I think it is.
The other thing that I feel I have to tell you is the difference between what the average shop owner does and what the shop owner that’s really making it happen does. That extra mile? Blogging is part of it.
That’s something that we’ve been hearing a lot last year and so we need to talk about that. Let me tell you: blogging is not dead. If you check out any successful business on the Internet they have a blog. It’s because it works and it’s not that that blogging is dead – it’s the old way of blogging that’s dead. It has changed and evolved and now it’s not all just about writing long blog articles like we’ve used to back in the days. It’s about creating a different type of content:
it could be a blog;
it could be an audio blog or a podcast;
it could be a recording that you get transcribed;
it could be pictures mostly;
it could be drawings;
it could be tutorials etc.
Blogging isn’t dead but the old way of blogging is, which means that you need to adapt and it’s also actually great because that means that you have more options. You don’t have to write if you hate writing!
Why should you blog if you’re already engaging with your audience on Facebook or on Instagram or any other platform? It’s great that you’re doing that work, but the moment YouTube or Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or whatever platform you’re using changes its algorithm, you can lose your reach, traffic, and sales. It’s something you can’t really control.
The best way to avoid that is to actually have the blog on your own website, put your content there and then share it across your own platform to bring people back to your store and to your blog. You have to start with your own domain and your own URL so that you’re really growing the audience on that platform that’s yours before you spread it across social media. In my opinion, you should be opening up a blog if you don’t have one yet.
I know you have a lot of work already, a lot of marketing work to do, a lot of product creation to do and everything is time-consuming. Some of you still have another job and adding a blog and saying that you’re gonna blog twice a week is really just not going to happen. Don’t set the bar too high, especially if you’re just starting out. It’s not an issue that you’re not blogging every week at all. You can blog once a month really and that’s enough as long as you commit to a deadline and you really do it. Consistency here is more important than doing it often.
That’s my advice. I hope it helped you understand why blogging is so important. If you’d like to dive deeper into blogging for your handmade business, check out my blogging workshop inside Tizzit HQ.
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