The Power of Blogging

Many people have the wrong idea about blogging. So many individuals have their personal blogs about whatever is on their mind. Perhaps they are sharing travel stories, favorite restaurants or new music tastes. Blogging is great to share personal insights and information that others may be interested in.

However, blogging can also be a powerful business tool. As an automotive shop owner, there are so many different topics you can write about and share on your online blog. Did you get some new equipment in the shop? Did you hire a new employee? Did you attend a training seminar or industry conference? Are you advertising a service special or limited-time discount? Did a customer just give you a positive review? These are all great topics that will give potential customers a positive look into the way you do business.

In addition, you can provide helpful information about services you offer. For instance, say you are a paint and body shop. You can write an insightful article about how to achieve a smooth paint job, from the body prep work that goes in to the application of the paint. It may not seem exciting since it’s the kind of work you do everyday, but somebody out there may be interested and that somebody could be a customer someday. They might be looking for information about automotive paint and a Google search leads them to your blog post. That blog post intrigues the reader and they start following your blog. Pretty soon, you have a loyal customer even if he has yet to bring his car into the shop.

Even if readers aren’t reading every single one of your blogs, simply having an active blog will be a huge boost in your SEO (search engine optimization) appeal. The more content you have on your website, the better. And, the more fresh content you have (meaning new stuff that is added on a regular basis), the better your search results will be.

Blogs can and should be loaded with keywords and search terms, so that if someone is searching for information that may ultimately lead them to your shop, it improves your chances of your site (or a specific blog post) coming up on the search engines.

Another powerful aspect of regular blogging is what’s referred to as Online Reputation Management (ORM) in the field of public relations and marketing. The more positive content about yourself that you are putting out there through blogs, the more you can control how your business is perceived by potential customers. You can’t control what people might post on review sites like Yelp! However, if there are negative comments anywhere, you can essentially drown them out by putting more positive information out there.

In future articles, we’ll talk more about how to write effective blogs and delve deeper into bigger issues such as SEO and ORM. If you have any questions about blogging for your automotive shop, just contact NextGear Marketing for a free marketing and web content consultation.