With almost half the globe accessing the internet regularly, there has never been a better time to give your business an online presence. Blogging is one way of helping your small business grow. It’s also one of the best and easiest ways to market your business online, although it does require a good deal of time.
Take a look at the benefits of blogging for your small business (and why blogging is worth it):
- Blogging helps bring traffic to your website.
- Blog content connects readers to your brand.
- A blog keeps customers updated about your business and new offers.
- Blogging helps with lead generation.
- It offers long-term results.
- It boosts your visibility.
- It encourages feedback from your customers.
- You can repurpose blog content for your social media presence.
- Blogging provides natural link building.
- Blogging provides value for your customers.
- It helps you build a network within your field.
- It’s a cost-effective content marketing strategy.
- Blogs teach and explain more about your products.
This article looks at the potential benefits of blogging for your small business and the impact good blog content can have. Keep reading to find out why you should invest in a small business blog and how to get started.
1. Blogging Helps Bring Traffic to Your Website
Every business wants more visitors to its website. Gaining visitors is one of the best small business blog benefits there is. Without blog articles, potential customers may only find your site in these ways:
- They could type your business’s name in search engines or even enter your address in the address bar. However, this is limited to visitors already familiar with your brand. They already know what products or services you offer, meaning you’re not getting new traffic.
- They could click on your paid ads. While these are often effective, they’re very expensive, and the traffic stops coming immediately after your money runs out.
- You could also buy a mailing list, spam the users, and hope that some will click on your links. However, this is illegal in many countries, and you risk violating GDPR laws, and is absolutely not recommended.
Instead, the best way to create organic traffic for your website is through blog articles and social media posts.
By writing helpful blogs related to your products, new visitors will stumble upon them as they look for solutions or recommendations on search engines. This will lead them right to your website.
Further, if you have a sales funnel (and you should to further improve revenue), a blog is a great way to lead new users to it. The visitors will then be on your site where you can place an offer right in front of them.
2. A Blog Connects Readers to Your Brand
As a small business, most of your prospects might not be familiar with your brand. This is always a hindrance to sales because people prefer to buy products and services from companies they trust.
Therefore, one of the other big benefits of business blogging is that a blog gives you a chance to connect with your readers. At the same time, it helps position you as an authority in your niche.
Most blog posts are either solution-based or offer recommendations. Therefore, if your readers get value from your blog articles, they will respect your authority on the subject, and thus trust your brand.
Additionally, most blogs are written in the second person, which gives the reader the feeling that you’re talking to them directly. And as they continue to read your posts, they’ll feel like they’re talking to a friendly expert and therefore warm up to your brand. Further, you can, and should at times, provide personal experiences
3. Your Blog Can Keep Customers Updated About Your Business
Online marketing is a headache for most small business owners. It’s too costly to run ads on mainstream media or run enough paid ads on social media to get everyone’s attention. It’s even more difficult if you’re a small company that has a new product or service to announce.
Fortunately, blogs don’t have to be just informational or how-to articles; they can also contain the latest industry news or relevant content for your company.
If you’ve hired a new executive, interviewed an industry expert, or had a case study that shows how your products are beneficial to clients, you can post it on the blog. You can also announce new products or offers, which will keep your existing customers engaged with your business.
These constant updates also humanize your brand and show your customers that you’re focused on value as opposed to just sales.
4. Business Blogging Helps With Lead Generation
Since your blog brings some traffic to your website, it’s a great opportunity to convert the traffic into leads.
Just as every blog page on your site is an indexed page, every post is a chance to generate new leads. This is pretty simple to achieve as all you need is to create a call-to-action at the end of each blog post.
These call-to-actions typically offer a lead magnet such as a free service or free trial of your product, webinar, ebook, or other valuable content that the visitor can trade for their contact information. Here’s a small breakdown of how it works:
- A new user reads your blog.
- They see the call to action and click on it.
- They’re redirected to a landing page, where they can buy or sign-up for your product.
- If they’re not interested, your page offers them a free token if they fill out a form with some information, including their email address.
Once the visitor leaves their email address, you can use it to send them discounts, offers, and links to your new articles. This way, they won’t forget about your brand and might make the purchase when they’re ready.
5. It Has Long-Term Results
Great blogs answer most of their readers’ questions about a particular topic or niche. They solve their problems and recommend trustworthy products.
Therefore, if you have a good blog, your readers are likely to consider you an authority in your field and come back when they have a question about a product. This gives your blog a long-term impact on your website traffic.
For instance, if your visitors find helpful information on your blog, they are more likely to click the call-to-action and join the sales funnel because they’re confident about your abilities.
In addition, prospects who’ve been getting value from your blogs are likely to enter your sales funnel with some knowledge about your products. This makes conversion rates faster because they don’t need to take a lot of time to decide whether or not to buy.
Finally, when you post a blog, it remains on your website forever, or until you delete it.
Therefore, a user who encounters a problem you blogged about five years ago can search and find your helpful article. This means that even if a post doesn’t increase website traffic immediately, it will eventually. Further, you can always remind your target audience of a blog article and how it can help them through your social media.
And the more well-designed social media posts you have, the more traffic you’re likely to generate in the future.
6. It Boosts Your Visibility
A good ranking on search engines can do wonders for small business owners. When most users type something on Google, they are likely to click on one of the first-page results.
And if your website ranks on the search engine results page, you will get lots of new traffic, if you have done satisfactory search engine optimization. Unfortunately, many business owners don’t know what it takes to appear on top of the first page.
Thankfully, there’s a whole industry that deals with Search Engine Optimization for websites. SEO experts can generate high-ranking blog posts for your website that will likely appear on the first search page.
However, if you don’t want to outsource these services, you can also learn how search engines rank results on their search pages. Although their algorithms are complicated and hard to predict, most search engines prefer authoritative content.
Therefore, if you write a well-researched, informative blog post for your website, it’s likely to rank higher up on the search engines. As a result, prospects who search for a product or service you offer will not have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to get to your brand.
7. It Encourages Feedback From Your Customers
A good blog is a two-way conversation between you and your reader. It should allow the visitor to voice their opinions about the content you’re writing and your products. Most blogs achieve this by including their social media pages in the call to action section (or down the side of the blog page).
This also encourages the visitors to visit your social media pages and increases the number of followers you have. With many followers, you can get good topics for your blog based on the frequently asked questions. You can also find out what your customers think about your products and what you need to improve.
Having these two-way conversations is a great way to boost your customers’ trust in your brand and increase the chances of returning customers and referrals.
8. You Can Repurpose Blog Content for Social Media Platforms
Most small businesses don’t have social media managers. This makes it challenging to find something to post about every day.
Unfortunately, inactive social media pages get little engagement and don’t add value to their companies. With almost half the people on earth accessing social media regularly, this is a huge missed opportunity.
Therefore, instead of pulling new social media ideas out of a hat, you can just repost what you wrote on your blog and keep your accounts active.
Alternatively, you can post the most interesting snippet of your blog and attach an interesting graphic or photo with a link for those who want to read the whole post. This enables your blog and social media pages to feed off each other.
You can also add a share button to your blog post and allow your readers to post it to their social media pages. If you write informative blogs, your visitors will want to share the information with their friends on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, effectively increasing your brand’s visibility.
The random shares and reposts will expose you to prospects who’ve never heard of your brand but are likely to trust it if they trust the visitor who shared.
9. Blogging Helps With Link Building
Backlinks are among the 200 factors Google algorithms consider to rank pages on the search engine. Some experts also believe that it’s one of the top 3 factors in SEO. Many SEO experts also believe that link building is the most challenging part of Search Engine Optimization.
When you create articles that give value to your visitors and other companies they see as authorities in your field, it gets easier to gain relevant links. Linking authoritative websites shows recognition or confidence in other sites. This signals to Google that you understand your field and network with other experts.
Backlinks also help your website build its domain authority and make it more visible.
10. Blogging Provides Value for Your Customers
For your business to be successful, you need to forget about sales and think about customer satisfaction. If your customers are happy, they will buy more of your products and even refer their friends and family.
A good blog post helps your readers solve problems, find something they’re looking for, or learn something new. These posts are more interesting than in-your-face ads because they serve a meaningful purpose other than just marketing.
When you take the time and create an informative blog post for your readers, you’re creating loyalty from potential customers who will likely choose your company when competitors approach them in the future. This value also increases your approval on social media and your brand’s overall appeal.
You can even add testimonials from these loyal customers on your website to help convince those who might be having doubts about your products.
11. It Helps You Build a Network Within Your Field
Thanks to backlinks, you can connect your blogs and website to authoritative sites in your niche. This is not only good for Search Engine Optimization but also for how customers perceive your brand.
Every field has a handful of reliable blogs that post regularly and provide useful information. These blogs often use backlinks to promote each other and stay on top of the search page. Joining such a network could be very beneficial to your sales.
12. It’s a Cost-Effective Content Marketing Strategy
The benefits of blogging are accessible to all small business blogs. You don’t need qualified professionals to write your content, especially if you’re already an expert in your field. You also don’t need to pay for ads because relevant content and good SEO will ensure that your blog gains organic traffic naturally.
Therefore, your main investment while blogging will be the time you spend researching and writing. Otherwise, a blog article is essentially free marketing! This can be time-consuming and take a while to pay off in terms of search rankings, but it is a solid way that blogging can benefit your small business.
13. Blogs Teach and Explain More About Your Products
Since most new visitors are unfamiliar with your brand, you can use blogs to explain how your products and services work. You can link to case studies that prove their quality or give step-by-step tutorials on using them.
It’s also advisable to use professional-looking graphics to grab your readers’ attention and better market your products.
With adequate information on your products and services, customers will be more confident about paying for them before using them.
How to Start a Blog in 5 Steps
The truth is, starting your small business blog is probably the hardest part. It shouldn’t take you too long but you do need to consider the best way for you to start. However, as you have read, the many benefits of blogging make the time invested truly worth it.
Here are the 5 basic steps you need to follow to begin writing your business blog:
- Choose a blog platform– You can make it easy and use a free blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger, or Tumbler. We use WordPress because it gives us the most flexibility to add functionality (using plug-ins) and design our blog.
- Get a web host– For example, you can get a web host through WordPress or use your own domain name and self-host. Although self-hosting requires a bit more work, visitors will go directly to your web domain and you’ll be able to add any content, images, and videos you’d like.
- Design your blog– Assuming you’ve chosen to use WordPress as we do, you’ll now need to find a WordPress theme (which is free!). You’ll have to do a little research on how to design your website, so keep the theme simple. You’ll want the light to shine on your amazing content and beautiful images, not on a complex theme.
- Write your first piece of content (and add more articles consistently).
- Create a social media post that includes your new content and beautiful blog graphics.
Then continue to repeat numbers 4 and 5. Although it can be a little confusing, just go step by step and you’ll be sure to end up with a stunning blog for your small business!
Now that you understand the benefits of blogging, Laughingbird Software will help you easily design your small business blog graphics! Sign up for free access!
