Should interior designers have a blog on their website?

While blogging is a great way to bring stable traffic to your business through SEO keyword searches on Google, it may not be the right time for you to get started. 

Here's how to know what you're ready to start blogging on your website:

1. You have expert knowledge in your industry that you have spent years learning about and practicing. Now it's time to share that knowledge with the world to benefit other people's lives by helping others be educated in your area of expertise. For instance, I've been doing web design casually for 19 years, and 8 years professionally. It wasn't until about 2 years ago that I realized I had amassed a lot of expert knowledge that I felt confident enough that my insights were valuable to other businesses. 

2. You're already getting leads to your business and generating stable income. For many business owners, blogging feels like a chore if the rest of their business is not figured out. Blogging should be one of the last things you implement. Blogging should come well after things like establishing your website, setting up email marketing, creating ads in Google & Facebook, and standardizing your business model. Blogging & SEO, in my experience, is the slowest way to get new clients and leads to your website, but it is also one of the most stabilizing marketing methods if done regularly for many months. Blogging should be done once all of your other business elements are roughly in place.

3. The idea of sharing your ideas is exciting. For most business owners, blogging is a chore. What should you write about? Will other people read it? Over time, if you keep at it, you will get more and more readers in the next 6-12 months. But if you do not enjoy the idea of writing, then it will be an unnecessary chore.

4 benefits of blogging

1. Your writing has the potential to be found by Google Searches for years to come. There are blogs I have written and that my clients have written from over 2 years ago which still get found and read today from doing keyword searches on Google. Blogging is one of the most effective ways to build SEO value into your website. I get thousands of views to my websites every month because of blogging.

2. You establish yourself as a leader in your industry. Writing about expert topics that most other people do not know is an important way to build credibility for your company. 

3. Genuinely help other people. Reading is one of the most valuable ways to learn about complex or theoretical topics. When you write about your expert knowledge, you given hundreds and thousands of people the opportunity to make their lives better. Your audience wants to learn, and you can genuinely make people's lives better by teaching them things they would have a hard time finding elsewhere.

4. Practice your skill or writing and communicating. Blogging is a very low-risk way of practicing your skills in writing. Websites can be changed at any time, unlike a published book, so you can remove blog posts, edit them, change them and use it to get better at expressing your thoughts and ideas. 

If you love writing, if you want to share your knowledge with others, and you believe that your knowledge with help others learn new topics, then it might be a good time to start blogging.

Here's how to get started:

1. Write at least once per week. The more topics you write, the more opportunities there are for being found in Google searches as well. Plus, people want to see that you are consistent and involved, which builds credibility as well. 

2. Track your ideas. You can save ideas on paper, in a project manager, on a phone app, or as a draft on your blog. I personally save all my ideas as a 'Draft' in my Squarespace blog so I can come back and work on them later, or schedule them out in the future. This way, I'm not losing any progress or losing ideas as they come up.

3. Use your blogs also as email newsletters. When you write, you can reuse topics in all other kinds of places, like emails, social media, even e-books or how-to manuals for clients and customers.