Your Winery Doesn’t Have a Blog? Five reasons why you need one. Now!

FIVE REASONS YOUR WINERY NEEDS A BLOG

• It’s the best way to build the story of your brand on a platform you own. Your website should have an “About Us” section, but that is such a small space you have to tell your brand’s story without losing the consumer’s attention is very small. A blog provides your brand with the opportunity to build your story, instead of telling your story.  Bite-size post-after-post, in a way that is easily digestible to your consumers, but also far-reaching over time. Your advantage is that you own your blog space, so it is up to you to decide how it looks without the discomfort of what the social media channel might change in its design or algorithm, almost always with unwanted changes to your blog.

• A blog provides a permanent content anchor. Consider that the half-life of a tweet is 24 minutes and the half-life of a Facebook post is 90 minutes. That means that half of all view that your tweet will ever receive will occur in 24 minutes and half of all views your Facebook post will ever get is 90 minutes. Fleeting. A good blog post, foundationally built correctly by a good web designer, is catalogued by search engines and will be available to be discovered for years into the future because they are being found on a search engine. Great presence is not just visibility when the content is released, but relevant over time. Yes, blogs are age-worthy.

• Blogs are longer form than social channels. The optimal length for a Facebook post is between 60 and 250 characters. The optimal length for a Tweet is between 70 – 100 characters. The ideal length of a blog post is between 800 and 1,600 words (However, effective blog posts can also be shorter than this). That gives you more space to tell your story.

• Blogs help with your Search Engine Optimization. Of course, you want your brand to be discoverable and come up as high as possible in as many different searches as possible. Properly maintaining your blog helps with your SEO because it will provide a continual stream of fresh and relevant content (search engines love sites with fresher content). It will also provide a broader set of discoverable search terms and phrases. For example, it would be totally counter-productive to have a long and uninspiring page on your website that lists every type of food that your wine pairs with well (you actually could be penalized by Google). For the optimal benefit of your blog, it has to be a part of your primary web domain content and not living in a distant blog space.

• Blogs provide rich content for social media posts. One of the most asked questions when teaching on blogging, is “What can I blog about?’ And I will lie if I tell you it is easy to provide a variety of social posts that provide value to readers without being self-serving. A blog post is longer-form content and therefore provide several different angles you can take to promote and link to a single blog post on your social media channels. For this blog post, I could post to social media about how blogs help with SEO, then tomorrow post to social media about what the optimal length is for a blog post vs. a Facebook post, and then the next day tease in a social media post the difference between telling your story and building your story. Three different social media posts, all that comes from and link to this same blog post.

The benefits to blogging are compelling, but In order to reap the benefits of the blog for your winery, you have to make sure of three things:

• Be committed to it. Like anything in digital marketing, there are no shortcuts and benefit only can be realized by consistency. You should be prepared to post to your blog 1 – 3 times every week to make it pay off.
• Make it interesting. Your blog post is not a scheduled ad for your winery. If your posts become too self-serving, you risk losing your audience and wasting all your work. By all means, talk about your winery–give inside views and information, talk about your history, or build excitement for upcoming events and launches–but make very certain that these posts do not read like sales pitches or ads. Balance your blog posts with other interesting content about the industry, your customers/visitors or even winemaking in general.
• Promote like crazy! Promoting your blog posts on social media is a great start, but you should also have callouts to your blog throughout your website, put the URL on your handouts or other customer information sheets, promote it in your email campaigns, and allow other blogs to repost your best work on their blogs (Be sure that they give you credit and link back to the original post on your site).

We’ll leave you with this golden rule: be unfailingly authentic. These are tips to be effective and to grow your audience, but remember that you have something people want, it’s time to tell them more about it.

As Beverly Sills said, “There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”