Why a small business should blog

Personalize your small business. Here is a place where an audience is at your disposal. You can tell them about yourself, your business, your next move to take over the world (any Pinky and the Brain fans out there?). You can also educate your audience to better understand your specialty or industry. Here is your chance to allow current customers and prospects to get to know you and your business, so don’t forget to bring that personality out in your rhetoric.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is great for blogging. Do search queries in the search engines to research keyword phrases that are widely used and most relevant to your small business. Choose a few keyword phrases that are most relevant and sprinkle them onto your blog content. This will give your website a boost in rankings on the search engines. Remember that nothing happens overnight, thus keep blogging and continue to “sprinkle” for better results.

Build relationships. Want to know what your customers are thinking? Well, blogging gives you that opportunity to reach out to your audience and find out what they care about. You can help them answer questions or concerns about issues relevant to your expertise or small business. If you can show that you genuinely care about your customers, then a long standing relationship has been formed.

Share and collaborate with others. These are opportunities that come with blogging. Here the great bloggers can find you, and vice versa, resulting in some collaborating magic. Blogging is a great way to share your ideas, showcase your talents, and tout your masterpiece with other talented individuals or companies. The antidote to some incurable disease is within our grasp and just might begin with a blog.

Build a following. Having a blog gives you the opportunity to build brand recognition. It allows you the exposure you need to create a following. You can create an RSS feed to allow your followers to be up to date on your most recent blog entry, and spread the word about your latest post on the social networks to draw a crowd. Your audience will become your followers as you work to develop brand loyalty.

Become an opinion leader in your industry. This you must earn and one way of earning it is by blogging about your specialty or business. It is up to the audience to determine your reputation so ensure that your blogs are authentic and honest like you and your business are, and that they contribute to the industry.

Blogging is cheap! There’s no need to run out and spend tons of money on marketing. You can have a blog up in less than an hour at a very low cost or even free at websites such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, all content management systems. A blog provides an extremely inexpensive avenue for you to market your small business or specialty.

It’s fun to give and receive. You give your industry knowledge and in return you receive (in the web realm) retweets, shout outs in the social networks, comments on your blog entries, and inbound links. It’s really nice and encouraging to know that people care to read your material as much as you enjoy writing about it.

Great addition to your overall marketing strategy. If you have a business, small, large, extra large, no matter the size, you must have a marketing strategy and you, 9 times out of 10, should be blogging about your business. Blogging is an essential marketing tactic to your overall marketing strategy. Make sure these plans are put in place and execute!

Grow your small business by generating leads. I have not forgotten the whole point of blogging. Yes, it’s to bring in more customers! Yes, it’s to increase sales! Yes, it’s to make more money. So…what are you waiting for?