The rumor is that blogging has gone the way of the dinosaur. However, people are missing the benefits of having a blog. While there are more social media apps that are receiving buzz and people are flocking to them (including the recent 2020 launch of Instagram Guides), blogging has maintained throughout with benefits such as:

• SEO
• Larger brand deals
• Appealing to people outside of your current community

In this post, we’re going to talk about whether you still need a blog.

Benefits of a Blog

1. Community – Quality content is created on blogs for both your readers/community as well as brands to see what value you can bring to them. Blogging is a great way to build long term community as it builds trust over time.
2. Establish Expertise – Your readers will see how your value, knowledge, and expertise grows over time.
3. Ownership – We do not own social media therefore we need a place where our viral content, solid content, or most engaging content has a place to reside. And can easily be found. Your blog is your piece of internet real estate.
4. SEO – The long term SEO benefits allow your content to be searchable years from now when people are looking for a particular subject matter.
5. Evergreen Content – Do you create evergreen content? Evergreen content is content that is always relevant, timely, and helpful. Having evergreen content is beneficial for your blog because you will be able to drive traffic any time of the year. Depending on your niche, your website traffic will ebb and flow. Evergreen content will balance out those waves, and in the long run, create a consistent source of traffic and income.
6. Leverage – Thanks to evergreen content and SEO, you will be able to leverage your blog in multiple ways, including monetization, community-building, building your personal brand, and scaling future brands.

According to this Forbes article, the first thing that matters most to blogging is to understand your readers. It also states, “Blog posts show up in Google results for years to come, while social posts create a quick spark about a brand. Combine blog and social together and you’ve got a strong brand awareness strategy via influencers.” This gives you more leverage when working with a brand. We discussed landing brand deals in a previous post

How blogging helps influencers secure brand deals

We hired an influencer (for 4 figures) who has 2K followers on Instagram, but a large blog audience & good presence on Facebook. She has 11k monthly page views on her blog & 27K Facebook fans. Her strong point isn’t Instagram. It’s her blog + Facebook. That makes her just as valuable as someone with 27K on Instagram.

Don’t neglect all of your other platforms just because you want to stick to Instagram & Instagram only.

A successful strategy involves growing EVERYWHERE. Not just Instagram. Instagram is one of the most utilized platforms in terms of landing brand deals. However, blogs/websites are still very much important to the brand & people do still read them. More than everyone realizes, actually.

Whenever a brand is searching for influencers for a specific activation, they create “influencer decks” which are presentations outlining the influencer, their stats, platforms, and a reason (we call it rationale) as to why the influencer should be selected. In these decks, it’s helpful to include relevant links to specific blog posts where the influencer has discussed that topic. For example, if we’re looking for influencers for a dish detergent campaign, we are going to include links to when the influencer may have blogged about keeping their kitchen clean, their favorite detergent, etc. We are looking for brand affinity and product usage. It’s much easier to find those examples via a blog, as opposed to combing through Instagram posts that were shared 2 years ago.

Now it’s up to you to decide if you still need a blog.

Check out this thread and this one too to share with your Twitter community.