What are the advantages and disadvantages of blogging? Whether you are building a business or already own one, blogging can massively increase your internet reach. A blog is a great thing to build on over time to improve your online presence.
But depending on the particular business you are operating, the digital space you intend to reach can be already well saturated. In a competitive business field, you can find it’s very difficult getting traction with your content. Plus, it can be difficult coming up with new blog post ideas. If you’re alone in your business, and create all your own content this can be all the more so.
Disadvantages Of Blogging For Business
There are several disadvantages of blogging for business. For starters blogging is incredibly time consuming. Do you have the time to create blog posts? In the time it takes to create a well thought out blog post, you could have set up an automated advertising campaign which will run forever! A single blog post won’t have the same impact as a paid campaign. Nor will it be as scalable and fast in generating website traffic.
Blog posts don’t always attract an audience straight away either. Google will often “sandbox” content for months on a blog. This means it won’t index and list your content on its free search results listings for months. Even if your content does eventually get listed, it may be way down in the search results at the bottom of page 1, or even on a later page.
This means you will need to promote your blog posts as well as writing them, costing you even more time. If you can’t afford to outsource your blogging as a business, you will need to set out time and energy to write them. It can be months before you see the results of your blogging campaigns too. A blog post might well bring in targeted visitors to your website. But you’ll need to write some good quality content to out match existing content on the web. Depending on your particular business niche, and the relative competition, this can be tough. In a more competitive industry, your chances of getting free listings for your main keywords are vastly reduced.
Disadvantages Of Blogging Platforms
While blogging platforms like Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com offer free blogging opportunities, the platforms aren’t well liked with the search engines. So in order to get more visitors to these kinds of platforms you’re going to need to work a whole lot harder with promoting your blog posts.
A blog post on a free platform can look less professional too. With your own domain name, you immediately have more credibility. If you’re a business, you definitely want to get your own domain name and hosting. Imaging visiting two different websites.
One is on a free platform and the other has their own domain name: e.g. www.localplumbers.com and www.localplumbers.weebly.com. The owned domain name is immediately more professional looking. For the sake of a small hosting fee and a cheap domain name which is less than $10 a year, it’s well worth upping your game if you’re in business online!
The advantages of blogging platforms like weebly, hubpages and blogger.com are of course that they are free to use and it’s easy to get started on them. Buying your own domain name and getting hosting takes a little more commitment. But this will be your online “shop front” and it’s well worth getting this right if you intend to be in business for long!
Advantages and Disadvantages Of Blogging – Affiliate Marketing
One of the best advantages of blogging for affiliates is that it’s cheap! Using paid marketing can become costly. When you’re starting out too, you should expect to spend money on advertising just while testing out your campaigns. So if you don’t have a lot of disposable income, this can be risky. Blogging on the other hand is less costly in terms of cash layout. (See also advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing).
Blogging costs next to nothing even with your own domain and hosting. It requires a commitment of time and some creative flair to keep blogging though. Many bloggers will quit because they don’t get the traction they want immediately.
Blogging as your only marketing method is pretty tough. You’ll need to spend several months or even years before you can see a regular income from a blog. There’s tonnes of content online and many other competing bloggers who have been around a lot longer.
Top blogs have lots of content and thousands of back links. This makes it more difficult to get your blog posts seen when you’re starting out. Expect to promote your own blog posts in order to get visitors. Don’t rely on Google to rank your content as it might never happen!
Not Scalable
A blog post can generate you free traffic over time, and many of them can bring in a whole host of new customers very cheaply. However, it takes a long time to build up your “bank” of blog posts and a lot of effort and creativity. Blogging isn’t scalable like paid marketing is. With paid marketing, once you see you are profitable, you can simply increase your marketing budget to grow your business. But with blogging, if a particular piece of content is doing well, it can be hard to replicate this success. Some content will do well and other content will be largely ignored.
On the other hand, once you have built a huge library of content, it can work for you for years to come. As your content grows over time, so does your digital “footprint”. If you craft your content well, to target your perfect customer, this can serve your business for years after you have created the content. See how to know your target market.
Summary
There’s advantages and disadvantages of blogging. As a long term strategy, blogging gives anyone the opportunity to create a digital footprint which they can use to generate income; either through their own business or the affiliate marketing model.
But this takes a lot of time and effort and depending on the niche you are blogging it, it can take months or even years. A competitive niche will be more difficult to get your content seen for than one which has less competing websites. Many bloggers start out with high hopes and quickly give up when they realise just how much effort and time is involved.
Over time though, if you stick at blogging, it can give you a passive income from the work you’ve done previously. See passive income and affiliate marketing. Blogging can of course be used in addition to other marketing strategies. As a sole marketing strategy, blogging can be tough. But in addition to using other marketing strategies, it can give you an organic traffic stream as a complimentary addition to using paid marketing, email marketing and/or social media marketing.
A regular blogging habit is what you’ll need if blogging is your primary marketing strategy. This can be tough to keep up, especially in the beginning. Make sure you choose a topic you are interested in and/or passionate about. choosing a topic which you’re indifferent to will be much harder!
So those are some advantages and disadvantages of blogging! Can you think of any more? Please comment below with any feedback! Thanks!