How often do you update your company website or blog each month?
Once a week? Once a month? Or... not at all?

We produce websites for companies in the area from Hamamatsu to Kakegawa. In many cases, as a site nears completion, the president or the person in charge asks us, "Once the website is finished, what should we do to make it work?"
Whenever that happens, we always say, "Sir, please write and post a blog article at least once a week. Do that and you'll definitely succeed at attracting customers!"

Unfortunately, however, very few people write blog posts as often as I recommend. It might even be fair to say almost no one does. At best it's two or three articles a month, and in the worst cases the site is left untouched for years with "Latest post, MM/DD: Our website is now open" still sitting at the top.

So when I ask, "Why don't you write blog posts?", the answers I get are usually along these lines.

"Well, I know I ought to write them, but I'm just so busy..."
"I'm run off my feet every day; I don't have time to write a blog."
"You tell me to write a blog, but I have no idea what to write about."

In short...
"Blogging is better than not blogging, but it's not a high enough priority to take time away from other work."
That, I think, is how they see it.

So why does writing a blog keep getting put off? I believe it's because the connection—"how exactly does writing a blog lead to attracting customers?"—hasn't quite clicked.

Let me shift the topic slightly to explain why. After graduating from university, I worked in sales at a copier manufacturer. After about two weeks of new-employee training, the first thing they had me do in my assigned department was cold-call canvassing. Map in hand, I walked a designated area and went into offices and factories one by one to pitch our products. Of course, a new employee who lacks product knowledge—and even basic business etiquette—isn't going to sell anything just by walking in. I'm shy by nature, too, so it took me two whole months to land my first contract...
I never came to like cold-call canvassing after that either, but I kept at it without stopping—regardless of the numbers—until I left the company. That's because I learned that continuing to canvass leads to contracts three months, six months, and sometimes even several years down the road.
Once you start selling to some degree, arranging orders and following up take more of your time. And once you can list prospects likely to sign within one or two months, you have to prioritize visiting them, so cold canvassing—which rarely produces immediate numbers—tends to get pushed aside. That said, you don't always have enough prospects ready to sign right away. Sometimes there's no prospect at all of closing anything that month. To avoid falling into that situation as much as possible, I felt the need to keep up cold canvassing—in other words, to keep developing new prospects.

I feel that writing a blog is close to today's version of cold-call canvassing. If a prospect is right in front of you deciding whether or not to sign, it's only natural to put all your energy there, and once they've signed or purchased, you can't neglect the follow-up needed to keep them satisfied. When that's the case, tasks that don't lead to immediate results inevitably feel like a chore. Even so, if you neglect the ongoing effort to find new prospects, it's hard to keep producing steady results—and a blog is an important sales tactic that fills exactly that role.

Finally, a website and a blog play different roles from a sales perspective. First, what is the website's role? It's to "close." It explains things to visitors who come to your store and persuades them to take action.
So naturally you can't get a response without a good website—but even with a good website, if no prospects come through the door, you still can't get a response, right? Building a good website is our job as a web production company, but attracting visitors is the blog's job... in other words, it's your job.

PS: "I get why blogs matter! I get it, but I don't know what to write..." That's a question of blog-writing skills and know-how. It's something we hear often, so I'd like to cover it in a separate post.