Don’t take this the wrong way.
But there are so many reasons your small to medium-sized business can benefit from a blog that you might be crazy if you didn’t consider it.
If you own or run a small to medium-sized business, I bet you can feel the economy improving. As people start to spend more, your business is ready to capitalize. Customers need and want your services.
Maybe you have a Yellow Page ad. Or you get leads every few months from your networking group. The prospects trickle in. Maybe your website sends leads once in a while.
But what you really want is a steady stream of prospects who find you online.
Because there’s a good chance that every single day, potential clients are looking for your services, products or expertise. The trouble is, they may not know you’re out there.
That’s why you need a business blog.
Because a blog can be a marketing tool. Say it with me, “Our blog is a marketing tool.” It can build your credibility, help your search engine optimization, and allow you to build trust and relationships with customers by communicating and connecting with them regularly. And it could be argued that a blog will do more for your business than a traditional website (especially if you have to pay a developer anytime you want to make changes). It can also help you set up an automatic newsletter that gets sent through email.
What is a business blog?
You may still think of a blog (short for web log) as a personal journal or diary that details your exciting adventures with your cat or your remarkable video gaming exploits; the latter exploits can be especially rich in content, given that mobile devices generate $92.2 billion in revenue, with 3.3 billion gamers worldwide playing on them.
Maybe that was the case 10 or 15 years ago. But at this point, you could argue that the term “blog” should just be replaced with “easily updateable website.” If you’re more comfortable thinking of your company’s blog as a news section, that’s ok. Because a blog is just a way to provide regular updates to your audience. It is simple enough to use that it can be updated by you or by your internal staff. One of the most common blogging platforms is WordPress, which is slightly more complicated than Microsoft Word. Just be sure your blog is integrated into your site under your website so it ends up having an address of something like www.ourcompany.com/blog (this is very important for search).
A blog for your business can take on whatever form you make it. You can define how you use it. It can be just a news channel where you post press releases. But it should be much more. It should be a way to share what you know, as well as a way to share your company’s culture and encourage your customers and audience to join in and interact with you.
Will a blog will help my business get found on Google?
One of the biggest benefits of a blog for your business is that each new post becomes a new page on your website – as long as your blog is set up properly. It’s no secret that Google, Bing and other search engines return to crawl your site when you have new content. And you can target each of those new pages for certain search terms. Want to be found for a term like “New real estate listings in NH” or “business blog development in the NH Seacoast“? ; ) Write a post about it.
You can also share each new blog post through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, or bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. The people who follow you in those areas (as well as their friends and followers) can easily share those posts with their friends and followers. We’re talking exponential exposure here.
So each time you create a new post, you’re not only offering valuable content (hopefully) that builds your credibility, you’re also creating shareable content that will generate inbound links to your site for the terms you want to be found for. Building these inbound links to your site is a huge portion of search engine optimization, which is what pushes you to the top of Google results.
Think about that. Are you paying a company for search engine optimization (SEO) services? Or paying them to build landing pages to capture leads? Those are great things to do, but if you had a business blog, you could target a specific search term in each post you wrote. You could write posts aimed at certain keywords that perhaps your competitors are being found for or are overlooking.
What do you think? Have you considered a business blog? Already have one? Let us know what you think below and be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed to get regular Vital posts when they’re fresh.
