Why A Blog Is The Best Platform For A New Business

Ok, so you decide to make an Online empire.
Where do you start, there are so many choices. Or are there?

If you listen to the experts on YouTube, there are a million ways to make a huge fortune. Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, Amazon, drop shipping, eStore, Etsy, Ebay and many more platforms are available for you but not all platforms online are created equal.

To make money, one thing is for sure, you’ll have to SELL something, to SOMEONE.

Unless you have a lot of start up money for Ads, it’s going to take a long time to get the huge attention you’ll need to start to make some sales. This is where the humble BLOG comes in. Anyone can build up a blog, into a money spinning business, one article at a time until it becomes the go-to site for that niche.

Brands

People pay attention to brands. To create a brand and promote it you will need Google, the search engine that completely dominates probably 90% of the internet. Importantly these must be searches made by people able to buy products or information.

You can make YOU your own brand, which could be important.  Suppose you name your brand after the main product. Then that product becomes obsolete, or is no longer in production, or cannot be obtained. Your whole blog is dead!

By using yourself as the brand, you can lead your audience into any area of interest. Because YOU have built up a following, a readership of loyal customers.

To get the ‘traffic’, or potential customers, you need to rank high, in Googles ‘engine’.

Google has spelled out what it will consider to be a good entity online, with its E.A.T update recently.

E for Expertise
A for Authority
T for Trust

Basically it will ONLY trust you and rank you high in its search engine, if your content is proven to be expert, ie. accurate, an Authority ie. others look to your information to verify things and learn things and so you can be considered Trustworthy.

When I say ‘proven to be an expert’, Google’s algorithm acts like a polling system that uses links and some other factors, to determine how ‘expert’ you are.

These links are backlinks from other sites, and the more you have, from other authoritative sources, the more ‘votes’ you get.

So what is the best platform to build your brand on? I can hear you thinking…I don’t want to waste time trying each one out. I don’t want any surprises, if I’m going to build something big, it has to be stable. If I’m going to invest my time and money, I want it to succeed and be long-term.

Search Intent


We can immediately rule out Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and all similar platforms. There is no search intent. People are only involved in entertainment or commenting. They aren’t easy to search and if we are selling goods, who would look on Twitter?  It has to be SEARCHABLE.

Also, have you noticed how long posts actually last on Facebook and social media? It is actually very short, the very opposite of what we need.

Initially, your new enterprise will be a PLAN B, a spare-time project. So actual physical goods which need to be shipped in when we stock up and shipped out when they are sold is not going to be practical, an eStore or online shop may be profitable, but it is a much more hands-on endeavor than is ideal.  Also, we need to keep costs to a minimum until things start moving at least.

What’s left? Blogs and YouTube. Google and Utube are both searchable, and they both have three main revenue building possibilities:
* how to articles or videos
* review articles or videos
* you can place Ads on the Content

Both can be used to promote Goods and Services

Both can be used to demonstrate products in use, if you have a leak in the car – look it up on Utube, someone else will have already found the cause and the solution. If you have back pain, there will be a blog with exercises for the back, a diet that promotes back-health, or pills to ease the pain.

What sort of person are you?
If you love talking, being the centre of attention, dont mind being on camera – Go with Utube.

if you’re shy, hate cameras, an introvert – Go with a blog.

YOU NEED TO OWN ANY SITE YOU BUILD !!!


Some things to consider and stay away from. If you start a blog, don’t do it on someone else’s property. Not Medium.com, not WIX.com, not any of the free platforms, like Blogger or Weebly.

So many folks have built up good viable businesses on Facebook, Wix, Etsy…. etc. Only to find one day they have been shut down because they violated some rule they maybe weren’t even aware of. One day your business is earning $1000 a week, next day zero.

Build your business on firm foundations.


Buy Hosting
Build a WordPress blog
Done. Safe. No one can shut you down.

Do take regular backups, to save having to re-do pages we lose through errors, from time to time

Why YouTube?


If you fit into the YouTube bracket, bear in mind it belongs to YouTube, you CAN be shut down! So make provision for it. Save all your videos, not just on the YT platform. On your backup hard drive.

Why am I making this exception? I did say above dont build your business on other peoples property.

Well you just cannot afford to ignore the HUGE amount of success going on, on YouTube, it’s such a great platform for the two things we are going to be doing. Promoting products and making HOW TO type videos . It is SO good in fact that i’m going to advise everyone who starts a blog, to (maybe a bit later on) also start a YouTube channel.

The Advantages of Blogs


• So many possible angles
• Cheap to start
• Not so important to schedule regularly
• Can include videos
• Very long term
• We can calculate the interest in any keyword
• It is possible to outsource article writing
• It is possible to use AI tools to generate content

Use Different Angles


Google presents us with an almost infinite number of KEYWORD related possibilities, we can write and rank for many more keywords. By writing on clusters of articles in a niche ( more of this important topic in later posts on this site ) we start to establish our Authority. If we are centred on boats for example, we can explore:
Canoes
Kayaks
Blow up boats
Safety equipment
Motor boats
Outboard engines
Sky boats
Best boating lakes in USA
Best boat trailor
Best boat tow car

Its cheap to Start a Blog


Blogging can be started on a shoe-string, it is the most likely platform to make you passive income
For each article you write, potentially, its another virtual salesperson in your store. Over time if the article ranks well, it will bring in the visitors to the site and sell some goods or information.

Outsourcing the Work for Blogs and for YouTube
Utube cant (easily) be outsourced Blogging can, you can have several writers, so eventually you will be able to blog less frequently, rely on your writers more.

Utube is’nt great for introverts, being on camera is almost essential, to be successful

To make decent videos, you will need some camera, microphone and lighting gear. This can be expensive though starting with a phone camera, especially outdoors in good light is possible.

There is a lot to be gained in YouTube, from very REGULARLY posting videos, fans can follow you better and the base of fans will grow much faster with regular posting, which is good, but hard grinding slog, to keep up the quality and interest.

Does AI work?

Yes and No. I wouldn’t try writing a full article from scratch, as yet (2022) it has been demonstrated to be lacking true writing ability beyond simple tasks.

Writing content, you can use simple AI tools and it can take the hard work out of building out a full detailed article. The ideas and strategies should come from your own brainstorming effort. Just build a simple framework, then fill it in with AI gen content.

Conclusion

That is why you should consider blogging, over any other method of building your online business. It represents a solid foundation that you can build on over time. It does not matter how much time or money you have to start it going. Over the last 15 years, more businesses have become successful by building blogs, than by any other method