6 Reasons Why Craft Businesses Need a Blog

24 Jan 6 Reasons Why Craft Businesses Need a Blog

As a craft business, creating a blog is one of the most important things you can do to strengthen your online presence. However, our craft clients often question the value of writing blogs. Blogs require time and creative effort, and they demand consistency. But there is no better way to drive traffic to your website, reach new customers and hold loyal customers’ attention than with a regularly updated blog. According to HubSpot’s State of Marketing 2023, blogs are one of the top marketing channels to deliver the highest ROI. In terms of media formats with the highest ROI, blogging comes in third after video and images. 60% of internet users read blogs on a regular basis (via Masterblogging). If you’re wondering whether people still read blogs: they absolutely do!

Let’s discuss some of the top reasons why all craft businesses need—and should have—a blog.

Drive Organic Traffic to your Website

The most obvious reason for hosting a blog is that it will drive consistent organic traffic to your website. Companies that blog have 55% more visitors to their websites than companies who do not blog (HubSpot). 

At the most basic level, blogging increases the number of pages on your website. This means that every time you post a blog, it signals Google and other search engines to save your new page and potentially show it as a result when someone queries a search engine. This is known as indexing.

Blogging increases your indexed pages, which are pages Google and other search engines analyze for content and then store in the search engine index. This is the mechanism that delivers results in searches. The more blog post pages you make, the more opportunities you create for your website to show up in relevant searches. Search engines place a lot of importance on fresh website content. Posting regularly to a blog tells search engines that your website is active, which the engines then reward with prioritization in search rankings.

Improve SEO

Consistent blogging will improve your SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. This dovetails with the reasoning outlined above. 

When creating blogs, it’s important to focus on including relevant keywords in the title, meta description, link title, any headers used in the copy, and in the first and final sentences. Refer to our Search Engine Optimization Priorities for Craft Businesses to learn more about proper SEO strategies. Discovering the right keywords for your business will also help you uncover rich topics for your blog!

Keyword-rich blog posts increase your website’s visibility in search engines, and blogs offer website real estate to include refined, highly-specific keywords on your website. Consider the targeted keywords included in a tutorial, a listicle of your favorite products, or an educational, resource-driven blog. Product pages should include keywords to drive traffic, and blog posts should focus on additional keywords to bolster your website’s rankings in search.

Blogs also support SEO because they create additional opportunities for inbound links. Inbound links are any links coming from other websites to your website. When a crafter pins your blog post to Pinterest, or links to your tutorial link on their website, they create an inbound link. Blog posts shared to social media also create inbound links. Websites with inbound links rank more highly in search engines, thus benefiting from increased SEO.

Create or Increase Brand Awareness

Blogging increases brand awareness around your business and establishes familiarity with your audience. The more blog posts you create that may be used for inbound links and shared across social media channels, the great visibility your brand receives. Blogging can attract new customers to your website, where they can find products they want to purchase. Research shows that 61% of consumers purchased products that were recommended to them in a blog post (Review42).

A blog provides a dedicated space on your website where you can set the tone of your brand and communicate the things that are important to you. A blog is where your brand’s personality can really shine! Use your blog to discover your brand voice. Your blog will become a place for customers and fans to learn more about your brand. Consider creating blogs that share products you love on your website or devising tutorials that use products on your website (creating internal links, another opportunity to boost SEO!).  

Social media is an incredibly valuable tool for finding and engaging your audience, but we all know how quickly posts get swept along the slipstream of the social media feed. Blogs are static spaces where you can communicate directly with your audience.

Establish Trust with your Audience

Brand loyalty should naturally follow brand awareness. Each new blog creates another chance to establish trust with your audience. When you write a tutorial or provide an informative how-to, you position your business as a thought leader. Blogs confer authority and present your business as a credible resource for information. Cornerstone content lives naturally in the blog space. Cornerstone content is where you show your expertise, and it usually means the creation of evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that has no natural expiration date and can be utilized and referred to well into the future (like this blog post!). Learn more about Cornerstone Content and how to use it!

Blogs should include a fair amount of give content. While we encourage blog posts that include links to products and services in your shop, we also recommend content that generously offers information and free resources. This goes a long way to establishing trust with your audience. Give content is one of the strategies employed in generosity marketing. Learn more about Generosity Marketing. (We created four internal links in this blog! Can you identify them?).

Grow Newsletter List

A blog is a great opportunity for gaining new newsletter subscribers. Let’s say you create a blog with a step-by-step tutorial for sewing a t-shirt quilt. Perhaps you outline the steps for creating the quilt on your blog, but would like to also offer a free downloadable PDF version of the instructions, with templates. Instead of simply including a link to the download in the blog, create a newsletter registration landing page and embed it in the bottom of your blog post. Then, ask readers to sign up for your newsletter to access the free PDF. We created a blog that illustrates this method in our Social Media Updates to Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. 

Creating a subscriber list tied to your blog can also help grow your newsletter subscribers. Write more content for your blog and invite readers to subscribe to your blog to receive updates via newsletter. Do you like our blog? Scroll down to the bottom of this page to make sure you’re subscribed to get notified when new blogs are published!

We have always stressed the importance of having a newsletter for your business because it is a direct line to your customer. Your customer has granted permission to directly email their inbox—a huge sign of implicit trust and interest in your business. A blog fortifies that channel to your customer. 

Be mindful, however, NOT to publish the exact same content on your blog and in your newsletter. Content on your blog is available to anyone browsing your site, whereas the newsletter should be ‘gated’ behind that permission wall. As such, be sure that your newsletter is the “super-special” high value content your customer is expecting. 

Support Social Media Efforts

One of the complaints our clients voice is a lack of content for social media. If you only push products on social media, you’re setting up your business to be ignored by followers. Fans will very quickly learn that your business is only interested in sales and tune out. 

Consistently posting one or more blogs each month gives you fresh content for social media. If you’re really strategic about it, you can even chop up a single blog into several days worth of content. Let’s say you create a blog featuring a number of new year’s resolutions for quilters. Schedule one resolution a day across the week, with each post linking back to the blog for full details. The same can be done for tutorials, listicles, and projects. As you build out a library of evergreen blog posts, continue to share them across social media every year.

Use blogs to generate conversations and create trending topics on social media. Blogs can increase engagement and visibility as social media followers share and reshare your blog content. 

We hope this blog has convinced you of the value and importance of hosting a blog as a craft retailer! Need help writing a blog for your business? Stitchcraft Marketing is a marketing agency of crafting experts. We customize every program to showcase your brand, engage your customer base, and generate sales in a way that is nothing less than magical. If you’d like more help generating content for your craft business or devising an effective marketing strategy, contact us today!