This is a guest post written by Beth Hayden of Blogging with Beth. She’s a blogging and social media coach in Boulder, Colorado.
If you’re a small business owner, coach, author, or other sole proprietor, you may be hearing every day that you should start a blog. But why is blogging so important? Why are blogs good for business? Here are my top six reasons why you should consider a blog.
- Search engines love blogs – Blogs help businesses get found and indexed by the search engines, so more customers will find their sites. The more often you update your website, the more often Google will notice (and index) you – and that’s good news for your search engine rankings. And the newest blogging technology makes it really easy for you to put up new content – see #3 – so you’ll be totally inspired and empowered to publish new articles, update and announcements about your business.
- The more pages a business website has, the more traffic it will get. A business that has a blog gets 55% more visitors to their website and 97% more inbound links (other blogs/sites linking to them). More visitors and more inbound links mean more people to convert to leads and sales.
- Blogs are easy, fun and cheap to create and maintain (especially when compared with traditional advertising and PR campaigns). Any business owner who knows how to use Microsoft Word can teach themselves – or be taught by a trainer – how to use a blogging tool.
- A blog’s ease-of-use allows site owners to quickly and easily publish content. The more useful, practical information a business can publish, the more potential customers will visit their sites. The web publishing world is no longer only accessible by people who have mastered HTML! If you know how to blog, that means you can edit, change and update your site or blog any time you like. What would YOU do with a website that completely under your control?
- A blog is a business’s own publishing platform – your messages can reach customers directly. Instead of having to seek out a PR agency to spread your message to customers via newspapers and magazines, you are your own publisher! What can you say to your customers that will educate, inform or entertain? Can you answer some frequently asked questions? Talk about what your business does and how it is different from your competition? Can you write an article explaining one of your trade secrets (yes, it’s okay to give some of them away – this generosity will come back to you ten-fold!)?
- Blogs help businesses create and develop community and conversation with customers. Let’s say you run a bakery for people who have an allergy to gluten (wheat). How about turning your blog into a place where people with allergies like this can gather to not only give you feedback on your store, but provide support to each other? Wouldn’t your readers be more likely to return to a site like that (and consequently, more likely to frequent your bakery because you provide such a cool support forum)?
If you’ve been hearing for a while that you should start a blog, but you’re still on the fence, hopefully the reasons above will give you the motivation you need to get started with Wordpress (my favorite blogging tool!). You’ll be amazed at the difference you see in your business!
Read more blogging advice at Blogging with Beth.