It seems like there’s always a million things to do when you’re running a small business … and somehow, writing that next blog just doesn’t seem to make your priority list. After all, how much good can a blog do, anyway?
But keeping up with a blog isn’t just something you should do because all the marketing gurus tell you to. There are loads of benefits to keeping an active blog up for your business. Here are seven very good reasons that your small business should have a blog:
1. Blogging allows you to position yourself as an expert.
This is probably the main thing people think of when they think of blogging — and for good reason! A blog is a great way to showcase your skills, expertise, and ethos in a way that makes you stand out from the competition. It’s one of the cheapest, easiest, and fastest ways to build some credibility for yourself, especially if your business is new or you haven’t had that many customers yet.
2. Blogging also lets you build a relationship with your customers.
Business has changed so dramatically in the past few years. If you were running a small business before the rise of online entrepreneurship, then you were almost certainly working face to face with your customers on a regular basis. But now, many small business owners never meet their customers in person, which can make it really hard to develop a relationship with them — and that’s become more important than ever in the fast-paced world of online business.
A blog helps you out with this by letting you walk potential customers through the know, like, trust, buy journey, and it also gives you a chance to reconnect with your existing customers regularly as you turn your blog content into email newsletters.
3. Your blog is a key part of your brand.
As you’re talking to your customers through your blog, you’re also building your brand. Writing blogs is a great opportunity to reinforce the key parts of your brand, advertise yourself (more on that in a sec), and develop a following of people who are already predisposed to buy from you.
What’s more, you can use your blog to specifically attract new customers who fit your ideal customer profile, while discouraging the kinds of customers that you don’t want. It’s all about the topics you choose to talk about in your blog, making sure that the tone of your blog is aligned with your overall branding.
4. Blogging makes for some great cheap marketing.
Blogging is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to raise awareness about your business, especially if you’re sharing your blogs on social media. While there are some basic costs involved, like hosting your website, and you have to spend a little time actually creating the posts and scheduling them into a social media sharer, it’s much cheaper and less time intensive than pretty much any other type of marketing, and you can get really powerful results from it.
5. You can use it as a springboard for other material.
A lot of small business owners who don’t blog choose not to because they feel like it’s too labour intensive. But actually, not blogging can leave you in a much worse position when it comes to creating content.
See, what many small business owners don’t realise is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to content — in fact, you shouldn’t! There’s no point in writing brand new content every single time; instead, you can take what you already have in your blog and scale it up or down into courses, webinars, newsletters, and even social media posts. But without that springboard? You’re stuck in constant creation mode.
6. An active blog boosts your SEO rankings.
While SEO criteria change all the time, having an active blog with high quality content has been a constant plus in Google rankings for years. The more often you blog, the better — Google will see your site as being updated, and it will rank it higher in searches, which is fantastic for getting more traffic on your site.
7. Finally, you can use your blog as a laboratory.
Your blog makes a perfect platform to try out ideas before you invest a lot of time in developing them into products or services. You can test the waters by writing blog posts or series about different ideas or discussing specific problems. If you get a good response from your audience about the idea, you know that there’s potentially a market for a product or service related to it. If you hear crickets, you know it’s a pass for now.
So to recap…
Blogging is fantastic for your business in so many ways. It positions you as an expert, makes your people care about you and trust you, builds your brand and then markets it on the cheap, keeps you from having to constantly create new content, drives traffic to your site, and serves as your own private idea lab.
And with so many copywriters and VAs out there to write and upload your blogs, there’s really no more room for excuses. So get blogging — and enjoy the benefits to your business!
