6 great reasons why you should have a blog to promote your craft business
‘Blogging is dead’, ‘Blogging is not dead’, so go the back and forth statements about blogging at the start of every year. If you’re wondering why you should have a blog to promote your craft business, let me take you through the benefits of using a blog to promote your craft business.
As someone who has built a career around blogging, I may be biased when I say blogging is not dead, it’s just changed. And, that’s to be expected as technology and how we engage with it evolve. For example, the advent of social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram ushered in an era of micro-blogging. This shift initially saw people abandoning their website blogs before figuring out that they could run the two side by side. By using their social platforms, not only connect to their audiences but also promote and drive traffic to their website, people can better connect their audiences to the products and services they sell.
Today, AI is disrupting how we generate and search for content, impacting blogging. So, despite the plethora of online promotional channels, leveraging a blog to promote your craft business remains a worthwhile part of a marketing strategy.
If you’re curious to find out how a blog can help you market your craftwork and boost your visibility, get answers to your questions in this article. First, we need to look at what a blog is.
What is a blog?
To appreciate why you should have a blog to promote your craft business, here is a definition from the Oxford Dictionary, and a brief introduction to what a blog and blogging are.
‘A blog is a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style‘. A blog comprises individual diary-like entries called Blog Posts. Blogging is the activity of writing and creating content for a blog post.
So, now that you know what a blog is, here are the reasons why you should use it as part of your marketing strategy to promote your craft business
1. You have greater control over how you create and share your content –
With a blog, you have greater control over how you create and share your content. You also have more options to customise your blog design to suit your brand, in areas such as layout, typefaces, backgrounds and button colours. A blog offers you the ability to use different media types in one post: written words, images, video, or audio clips. And, with a blog post, you can link to other posts on your blog or to external content, enabling you to direct your audience to where you want them to go next once they’ve seen and read your post.
And, unlike most social media platforms, a blog on your website has no restrictions on content length. You can say as much or as little as you want in your posts; just make sure your content is relevant, helpful, informative, educational or entertaining. Blog posts can also be edited to correct mistakes after publishing and, if required, updated to keep the content fresh.
2. You own your user data –
User data refers to the information you keep about visitors to your blog. This information is in the form of names, email addresses, age, location, interests and so forth. As explained in the definition, a blog is a type of website, typically set up on a hosting platform* i.e. GoDaddy, Doteasy, Bluehost. You can connect visitor data collecting tools to your blog, such as Google Analytics and mail subscriber providers such as Mailchimp, Flodesk, and Kit.
With these tools and, in addition to those that come with your hosting provider, you can keep track of and connect with visitors to your blog in many different ways, as they go through the journey from finding and reading your posts to making a purchase.
Customer management and mail subscriber tools enable you to save your user a data in the form of downloading a spreadsheet with the information. This means if something were to happen to your website and blog, you would still have your user data. The same cannot be said for social media platforms such as Instagram, which owns all the user data from traffic coming into their platform, in this case, your followers. Unless you persuade all your followers to visit your blog, website or sign up for your newsletter, you cannot engage with them outside of the social platform. And, if you were to lose your social media page or leave the platform, you would have no access to the community of followers you’ve spent precious time growing and nurturing.
3. You’re not tied to algorithms
Websites, social media and search engines run on algorithms. Algorithms help to enhance the user experience through functionality, performance, content delivery, searches and recommendations based on user interests and demographics. Algorithms, while useful, can hurt your digital marketing efforts by preventing your audience from seeing your content unless you play by the platform’s rules, i.e. paying to boost posts in your audience’s feeds.
Algorithms are constantly updated, and when a platform does so without warning, it can also impact your content’s visibility by restricting who sees it and when. In contrast, when someone visits your blog, they can see and browse all your posts. You can also react quicker to search engine algorithm changes by editing and updating your blog posts, as highlighted in Point 1.
4. You have the freedom to access, move and download the content you create
Some social platforms limit the access you have to download, edit or move around the content you share on your dedicated page. A blog gives you the freedom to move your content around to suit your needs. More importantly, you can save your blog content by creating backups of your posts, images, videos and so forth, to your preferred storage location, i.e. downloading to your computer.
By having a backup of your blog posts, should the worst happen, you can always upload them again- just remember to actually backup up your files! You can do this through the control panel on your web host.
5. It’s a traffic driver
People conduct millions of content searches daily on search engines and increasingly on AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. When you create blog posts that provide information and answers to what your audience is looking for, you help to drive traffic to your website. The marketing strategy for doing this is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), which refers to the words and phrases you use throughout a particular blog post to target a specific topic.
You can also use a blog to build your authority. If you create content that offers information centred around your industry, it can raise your profile. This helps attract the attention of journalists, curators, stockists, customers or fellow makers and students if you offer coaching, courses and workshops.
6. You can monetise your blog
You can turn your blog into an additional income stream by hosting ads, preferably from vetted suppliers and complementary sector-related businesses, rather than the random ones from Ad provider networks. The type of ads to consider could be: the shop where you get your materials from, an upcoming craft market, or a maker’s conference you enjoy attending.
Showing ads on your blog works best if you have steady traffic coming to your website, which is what blog posts do. If considering this monetising option, I would caution you to take a less-is-more approach to minimise interruptions to the reading experience, the sidebar tends to be the best place to place ads. And, be selective about who you partner with. What you choose to promote reflects on you, impacting the trust relationship you are building with your audience.
If you choose to manage the ads yourself, you will have to create a price list outlining how long the ad will be on your blog, in addition to having a set of guidelines regarding the ad size, design, and so forth. There are software platforms and plug-ins that can help you do this.
I hope you found the reasoning for having a blog useful, and if you are interested in using a blog to market your artisan hand-crafted items, find out how to get started in my post How to successfully start a blog and use it to promote your craft business.
– Tapiwa Matsinde
* Note: I run my website on DotEasy shared hosting and use Mailchimp; other than that, I am not affiliated with the hosting and email platforms mentioned, and by mentioning them, I am not offering advice to use them. If looking for a web host, I strongly recommend you do your research to identify the ones suitable for your needs.
[Image credits: The image shown belongs to Arina Krasnikova, sourced via Pexels. If downloaded and used elsewhere, please credit accordingly.]
