Blogging on Squarespace: Why it’s Easy and Fun and You Should Start Doing it Now.
Is Squarespace good for blogging? I certainly think it is. I’ve been using blog it to blog for years. In this post I share a lot of Squarespace blogging tips, but also talk about why blogging for your online business is a great marketing practice.
Contrary to popular belief blogging is not dead.
Many people I respect often offhandedly refer to a blog posts they wrote. This leads me to conclude that blogging is still very much alive and a great method of content creation.
The only time I don’t recommend blogging is if you hate it.
Even then, if the part of blogging you hate is the idea of committing to regular content creation, you can call your blog ‘articles’ or ‘resources’.
That way you’re not on the hook to publish on a regular basis.
There are other ways to create content. You can create case studies, appear on podcasts (or start your own podcast) or produce video content.
The standard arguments for blogging are that it’s great for SEO and it demonstrates your thought leadership.
I heartily concur, but there are other reasons I think blogging is great and how it’s directly helped me as a business owner.
Why you should blog for your business
Blogging helps you sharpen your message.
James Baldwin wrote: “When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.”
True dat.
I find a regular blog writing practice is extremely helpful for getting clear on the value I bring to my clients and what I want my business to be about.
Regularly blogging elucidates the problems you’re solving, the pain you’re alleviating and the value your offers bring, to not only potential clients but to yourself.
Blogging helps you clarify your message - both for you and your clients. And it’s easy With Squarespace
Perhaps like you, I listen to business podcasts, I read articles and I’ve done ideal client exercises.
The more you blog, the more automatic it becomes to talk and communicate with your clients in a way that feels natural and that really lands.
Nothing, NOTHING is as effective and clarifying as observing and listening to my clients, and writing posts based on these conversations and observations.
You write and you write and you write and then let it all settle within until it slowly seeps into your bones.
A robust blog archive is a fabulous reference tool for leads and clients.
When I’m working with someone who is getting stuck in their perfectionism I send them links to my ‘Your Website launch is not your wedding day’ and ‘Note to perfectionists’ blog posts.
If there are questions about legal pages, I can send them my blog posts about data privacy tools.
If questions come up in a sales call, afterwards I include a link to all my blog posts about my launch in a day one day website process.
Referencing these posts in the sales process has two benefits:
I don’t have to answer or address the same questions and concerns over and over again - I just send the link to a post
It gives a potential client a feel for who I am, and what working with me will be like.
Blogging helps your SEO (if you keep at it)
And the SEO stuff is powerful. After a couple of years of consistent blogging (with a lot of learning along the way) I increased my traffic almost 500%!
No gimmicks, no ads, no nothing. Just blogging a couple of times a month.
Okay, now that we’ve established the ‘why’ of blogging, let’s talk about getting started.
Blogging with Squarespace
Squarespace sometimes get a bad rap when it comes to blogging.
I’ve blogged on both Wordpress and Squarespace. I can talk about the pros and cons of both web platforms from direct experience. I’ll start with the not so great things about blogging with Squarespace.
Cons of blogging with Squarespace
Allegedly the SEO on a Squarespace blog isn’t as good as WordPress - but I’ve read from a lot of smart people who know a lot more about these things than I do, that this isn’t true.
One way that Wordpress does excel over Squarespace is bulk editing big amounts of content. Wordpress provides a spreadsheet type view of every post where you can edit tags, categories and all kinds of meta data in one go.
Whereas in a Squarespace blog you have to go into each post individually to make edits. Not ideal.
The other thing that I find annoying with Squarespace is that there is no easy way to make ‘no follow’ or ‘sponsored’ links for affiliate links.
This is a simple feature that Squarespace should implement - many people in the Squarespace community have been asking for it for awhile now.
There are some workarounds like using a markdown block. Kerstin Martin provides a really nice tutorial here.
[UPDATE: Now you can, with ‘Affiliate Genie’ an awesome new Squarespace plugin from Will Myers]
Now you can add ‘no follow’ affiliate links , with ‘Affiliate Genie’ an awesome new Squarespace plugin from Will Myers
Wordpress started out exclusively as a blogging platform. If someone came to me and said ‘I want to start a blog’ I would tell them to use WordPress
However, when someone says to me they want to launch a website for my business and I will do some blogging, I tell them that Squarespace has great blogging functionality.
Pros of blogging with Squarespace
Aside from the annoyances I mentioned above, the Squarespace blog is FINE. In fact, it’s more than fine, I actually like using it a lot.
Creating a blog and individual posts is beyond easy.
Squarespace Tutorial Library
How to Set up a Blog on Squarespace
A Squarespace blog has all of the features you’d expect. You can move posts between multiple blogs, you can add a social image and a thumbnail image.
Squarespace allows you to categorise and tag blog posts. You can assign a link to posts with certain categories and tags as well (that’s how I made the text navigation on the landing page of my blog).
A favourite way to surface blog posts throughout a Squarespace is to use the summary block.
You can filter what kind of posts you’d like to show, for example I’ve inserted one right below this text filtering only posts I’ve categorised as ‘Squarespace Tutorial Library’.
There are lots of settings to customise it to make it look just the way you want; image size, width overview page layout to name a few.
If you’re using Squarespace campaigns, it works beautifully with a Squarespace Blog. You can just insert any post from your blog library into a newsletter email.
Designing websites is the heart of my business and blogging with Squarespace supports this.
I’ve plopped in some of my tutorials on how to blog with Squarespace throughout this post, but if you want to really learn the ins and outs of blogging with Squarespace, I highly recommend you take Christy Price’s course ‘Make money with your blog’.
The title of the course emphasises blogging for affiliates, but there is a lot of very solid, easy to follow and thorough content on not only how to blog, but using Squarespace to blog.
I haven’t created a course on this myself, because I’m sure I couldn’t create a better course on using Squarespace to blog than Christy already has!
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