5 Compelling Reasons Small Businesses Should Blog
If you own a small business, you need to have a blog. Why? Because it not only helps you increase your authority in your industry, but it also ensures you always have interesting and useful content to share and promote.
Plus, it can give your business a good boost in the search engines. But these aren’t the only reasons you should be blogging.
Below are five reasons why blogging should be part of your business strategy.
1. It’s cheap
One of the main reasons so many businesses are already using blogs as a business tool is because it’s a cheap way to convert new customers.
Traditional advertising like direct mail, telemarketing, trade shows and PPC is pretty expensive. Compared to that, managing a blog and writing useful content is cheap and can generate new leads.
2.Blogging attracts links and increases search engine rankings
When you create awesome content, people are going to read it, link back to your site and talk about your business. These links you’re attracting help increase your site’s authority as well as your search engine rankings. And here you were thinking that having a Facebook or a Twitter account would be enough to get people talking about you. Well, it’s not!
Creating content for your blog is not the same as creating content for your Facebook Fan page. If you put up a clever status update on Facebook, you might get tens or hundreds of likes (depending on the size of your fanbase) but then they’re going to move on. An engaged blog audience keep coming back for more.
3. Your blog helps you reach a larger audience
Blog content is easily shareable, especially now with so many people registered on so many social networks. And if you create interesting and useful content, they’ll share it on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, with their friends, with their work colleagues, with their parents and with whomever they think may find your content useful or enjoyable. And if your content gets shared again and again, your audience increases as well.
4. It builds trust
When used properly, you blog can help boost the public’s perception of your business. For instance, they will know you care about your customers if your blog content is a conversation about them, and not about you. It’s a place where you do your best to provide value by asking them about their issues, answering their questions, providing solutions to their problems and helping them understand the value in your business.
This also helps you. By listening to their questions and the conversation around your company, you become more aware of your customers’ needs. And when you become aware of those needs, you’ll also want to get involved and provide solutions that can fulfil those needs. As you get more involved and become the number consultant in your industry, they’ll trust and value your brand even more.
5. Helps you become a better marketer
People are annoyed by marketing content but they love stories and blogging is the most effective way to educate your customers through stories. By using storytelling when you write blog posts, you become a better marketer as you’ll be able to attract, engage and convert a potential customer easily. Storytelling also forces you to learn how to speak to customers in their language. Knowing how to communicate with your audience is the key to any successful business.