(image by Steve Snodgrass, used under CC BY 2.0, modified from original.)

Owning a blog is not just about the act of blogging. Not anymore.

It’s about having a haven for your business. It’s about having an unwavering empire which continually brings your business traffic, and continually builds on itself.

Blogging is about having your very own business treasure trove.

I would personally rather lose my entire inventory of ribbon and fabric and paint before I lost my blog.

And yet, in the Etsy forums and such, I am constantly seeing people saying that they’re giving up on their blogs, or they’re frustrated because their efforts just aren’t panning out like they’d hoped.

Or even worse, they don’t want to try blogging at all. They want to keep focusing on Etsy tags and treasury-making instead.

I’ve written about The Big BB’s (blogging benefits) before. But, I want to get down to the knitty gritty here. Anyone can throw out a list of arbitrary benefits (and there are definitely plenty of ’em). What I want to do is really paint a picture for you to see how blogging can bring you business.

It starts with the purpose of your blog.

Your purpose in blogging is not to talk about yourself or your business, and it’s definitely not about needing to constantly come up with exciting things to talk about.

Most people think that’s what they’re supposed to do. They think they are supposed to whip up some stunning entertainment, and then somehow make that entertainment pertain to their products. If you can do that, great! But most of us who have attempted to do that have gotten very burned out, very fast. And, if your goal is to grow your business, that should not be the primary purpose of your blog anyway.

Your purpose is to attract customers. Not just anyone; your perfect customer. I call this person “Who You Benefit.” To do that, you need to figure out exactly who that person is, and then fill your blog with the things that that person would actually be seeking online.

Your ideal customer might very well think that your story about your cat is totally entertaining. But guess what? They probably will never see that story because they aren’t searching for it.

Do you see the difference? You can write entertaining stories about your life all day long, and you may have a few people here and there who accidentally stumble across it, and that’s great. But if that’s the only content you’re creating, you will soon find yourself frustrated and ready to throw in the towel on your blog… without ever seeing the kind of exponential growth that your blog is really capable of producing for you.

Now imagine that you’ve shifted your blogging perspective, and you write a few posts about topics that you think your perfect customers would actually be searching for on Monster Google. You create content that solves a problem for them, that provides an idea for them, or (the very best thing) gives freely to them. Here’s what you would see happen:

Unlike a Facebook status or even an Etsy listing, once you’ve hit the publish button, your post is out there in the world, and it’s there to stay. This means that people (those ideal customers whom you benefit…the ones you’ve written it for) will continually come across it in their internet travels, and therefore be continually exposed to your products.

It will get shared by some of those people, so even more people who may be interested in it will see it. It gets pinned. It gets tweeted. The traffic keeps coming, over and over. And, not just on the day that you published it… but the next day, too. And the next. And the next year. And the most awesome part?

You never had to do another thing.

You didn’t have to re-publish it every week so that it would stay at the top of Google search results. In fact, it just climbed higher in the search engines all on its own, the older it became, and the more likes, shares, and comments it received.

There was no re-posting and re-listing. You didn’t have to work harder and repetitively, just to maintain your relevancy. You worked less, and became more relevant.

A good blog doesn’t mess around. A blog gets the job done.

Blogging is not about churning out as many posts as humanly possible or becoming a super amazing wordsmith. It’s not about adhering to some strict schedule about when and how often you should be posting. It’s about providing value to your perfect customers… value they are seeking.

And, when you start seeing that every new post is bringing you more and more traffic, building on the traffic you are already getting from all your “old” content, you’ll realize that your blog has become a treasure trove for your business that no other marketing tool can even begin to compete with.