Why Should I Have A Small Business Blog (Part 2) – Recycling Content

Part two of our series on small business blogging builds on the topics covered in our first ‘Why Should I Have A Small Business Blog?‘ article. Just to re-cap, blogs are first and foremost a content source; allowing you the opportunity to create fresh, engaging content for your website which keeps people returning, and the search engines happy.

Why Should I Have A Small Business Blog (Part 2) – Recycling Content Is Easy

Still, whilst those two things are great – spending 30 minutes writing a blog is time in which you could potentially spend 30 minutes doing something else (although, see below), so how else can we utilise blog content?

Why Should You Have A Small Business Blog (Part 2) – Recycling Content

Apart from creating content which you can then use on your site, another great thing about blogs is that once they’re written, they exist forever (unless you delete them!). This means that you can freely tweet your old blogs to re-promote them and use the same content to drive different visitors to your site all the time.

Some topics never get old. If you’ve written a blog about ‘How to get more customers’, then it’s likely that the ideas within that article are going to be relevant for a long time. As such, you can simply tweet the same article out time and time again over a course of a few weeks and drive new leads to your site.

If it’s a topic that does get old, there’s nothing at all to stop you simply updating the relevant section – which will probably take a few minutes tops – and then sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the other social networks with the addition that it is now bang up to date.

A lot of the time people ask us about the ROI (Return on Investment) on things like blogging and social media. Where the initial investment is largely time, every time you drive more visitors to your site the return on that investment becomes greater and greater. If you can also link all your similar blogs together (like in the way we have at the top of this article), you can help visitors find other relevant articles, and thus keep them on your site longer – which makes them more likely to trust that your knowledgeable in your field, and thus they’re more likely to convert.

The other great things about recycling your blog content through social media is that it may well then also be shared by others – without needing any further effort from you.

What If I’m Not On Social Media?

Firstly, unless you’re in a very niche market or you’re prone to swearing at people you don’t know virtually, your business should be on social media. Even if you’re in a niche market, having a Twitter account or a LinkedIn page might make you stand out, and they’re both great for finding potential new leads – we’ve talked about how to find leads on Twitter in the past.

Still, even if you don’t want to promote your blog on social media, you can certainly do so via a newsletter.

In fact, one of the main complaints against blogging we often hear is that ‘I don’t have time to blog’. This is, on the face of it, a fair point – we mentioned it in the opening to this article. However, if you send a weekly or monthly newsletter, it probably takes almost as long to write all your content as it would do to write a blog post and then use that as the main article – if you commit to blogging once a week, you can even pick a few blog articles and include them in a monthly newsletter. This saves you the time and hassle of having to create a whole newsletter from scratch – the articles are already there, written, waiting to be recycled.

Why Should I Have A Small Business Blog (Part 2) – Recycling Content