Why Your Business Needs a Blog – Free Traffic & Passive Income
My previous blog name is Balkoni Hijau. It will be mentioned throughout this blog post. That blog has been rebranded to Helmi Hasan as you see it today.
I’ve been blogging for 2+ years, and it opened doors that I would never have imagined. Heck, I’ve earned business opportunities & even a digital marketing job mid-pandemic because of this blog.
But is blogging still relevant in 2021? Or is social media better? To me, they all have their pros & cons. I use it all for different purposes.
In this article, I will cover the benefits of having a blog that’ll include:
- The pros & cons of a blog over social media
- How a blog gets you free organic traffic that will last for YEARS
- Earn money from placing ads & affiliate marketing
- Blogging is a powerful way to personal brand yourself
Let’s start with the differences between a blog & social media profiles:
Blogging Vs. Social Media Vs. YouTube
| Differences | Blog | Social Media | YouTube |
| Purpose | All traffic should point back here | Announce your content & engage with your followers | It’s a great way for your personality to shine! |
| Pros | SEO articles will continue to drive you free traffic for YEARS. | Short-form content that tickles the audience’s emotions can go viral | Get organic traffic, & can earn ad revenue |
| Cons | A blog costs money to run & can get quite technical | Getting organic traffic is proving to be harder and harder | Not everyone can or want to make videos |
Whatever I do, I’d make sure that all of my traffic flows back to my website. Here’s a visualization of how that looks like:
Let’s address another common follow-up question:
Should I Start a Blog or a YouTube Channel First?
Find out which feels more natural to you, and start with that.
Killing 2 Birds With 1 Stone: I usually start by creating a blog post. I then use that as an outline for my YouTube videos. Then, when the video is published, I embed it at the top of the article. Here’s an example:
Great, now let’s dive a little deeper into the benefit of having a blog that I realized over the years:
Blog Benefit #1: Organic Reach (SEO)
When you post something on social media, the platform will limit who gets to see your posts because they want you to pay for ads.
Example: Neil Patel, a renowned Digital Marketing expert with 1M Facebook page followers, only have about 50 engagements for each of his post. That’s a depressing 0.005% engagement rate:
This is what can happen if you rely too much on social media. The platform can get greedy and decide to change how things work to benefit them financially. If you only have a Facebook page, you’re at their mercy.
If you have a blog and publish enough helpful articles, Google will start to trust your blog and rank you higher on search engines.
You’ll slowly build steady free organic traffic to your site (this can take a few months to maybe years). Here’s my blogging traffic in the past 2 years:
A quality blog will have most of its traffic organically (people clicking from Google search results).
So if any other social media platform decides to follow Facebook’s greedy footstep in the future, you won’t be too worried.
Now that you have steady traffic to your blog, you can earn additional income. The 2 most common ways are by placing ads and affiliate marketing:
Blog Benefit #2: Earn Money from Placing Ads
The easiest way to earn from display ads on your site is through an ad network.
Register with an ad network, & they’ll automatically place ads on each page of your blog that will be relevant to your viewer. Here’s an example:
You’ll get paid for impressions and clicks on the ads. For beginner bloggers, there are 2 popular ad network options:
I started with Adsense but moved on to Ezoic after a blogger friend recommended me to them. Ezoic’s customer service is pretty good, and they took care of everything during setup.
After a couple of days, you can see your daily ad revenue in USD:
Nice, this is as close to passive income as it gets! But wait, there’s another way to make money from your blog:
Blog Benefit #3: Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is when you promote other people’s products and services through a unique link, and you’ll earn for each sale coming from your referral.
The best way to promote other people’s products is to create honest review content.
Here’s an example of my review of the Xiaomi robot vacuum (I use it every day & love it).
Look at where I place my affiliate links on my YouTube videos & blog:
If anyone clicks on these links and buys something, I’d get a cut (typically between 1 to 7%). Pretty neat!
You can register with any affiliate marketing networks out there, but I use Involve as I find their dashboard to be the most user-friendly for beginners.
Pretty sweet! Here’s a peek at my affiliate marketing revenue for a blog with less than 10,000 users a month:
Not much, but hey, it’s something. If I were to scale up and publish more SEO content, I could increase my organic traffic and ultimately my ad & affiliate marketing income. Nice!
Blog Benefit #4: Powerful Personal Branding
In my opinion, the best reason to have a blog is for personal branding
When you have a blog and an about me page with your face on it, what you’re doing is personal branding yourself as an expert in a topic.
Take a look at this blog. What’s your first impression?:
Why is personal branding important? Well, having this blog opened up so many new doors that I would otherwise never access. Let me share with you my experience:
Connect With Influential People
I have several bloggers and Content Creators that I admire. Surprisingly, they also enjoy reading my blog.
Contacting them for business or personal agendas is much easier as I have portrayed value through my writing & YouTube channel.
Brand Sponsorships & Collaborations
From time to time, as your content ranks organically on search engines, more people will discover you, and companies could approach you for brand sponsorships and collaborations. For example:
Without a blog, you’d have to approach brands to work with you. But with the blog, some companies might be contacting you instead. That’s the power of personal branding.
Easier to Sell Your Own Product or Services
If you are launching a new business from scratch, you’ll notice pretty quickly that selling to strangers (cold traffic) is hard.
People don’t know you exist, let alone trust you enough to purchase your product or hire your services. A blog is a perfect medium to warm up cold traffic to show how you can solve their problems:
For example, if you’re a solar panel installer, creating helpful blog posts about how solar panels work and their benefits can get people to discover you on Google search results.
The more content you create, the more people will move down your AIDA sales funnel:
- People will know that you exist
- People will start to trust & like you from your helpful content
- Hopefully, people will contact you when they want solar panels.
Change Careers in a Crisis
Here’s a story where having a blog saved my career & finances. When my Airbnb business went bust right before the whole COVID lockdown in March 2020, I didn’t know what to do next.
It was a terrible time to start a new business (I wanted to set up a car wash business), and most companies weren’t hiring. But I noticed that there were many job ads with the title: ‘Digital Marketer.’
It seemed like something I’m interested in, so I applied to a few jobs online. Most were unsuccessful because I lack any Digital Marketing experience.
So I rebranded this website into a personal finance blog and documented my blogging journey.
Using my blog post as proof of my marketing experience, I convinced a company and got a full-time position as a digital marketer, mid-pandemic.
All thanks to this blog. Consider this blog as my online CV of what I can contribute to the world.
Start Your Own Blog
There you go. I’ve shown you the importance of having a blog for your business and you personally.
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