A blog can be a helpful addition to your small business website. If you’re searching for a way to reach your customers and keep them informed, a blog might be the answer. Nearly every business has useful information and opinions about their product, service and market that can be shared with their market via a blog.
Do I need a small business blog? (Click for a larger view)
What can a blog do for my small business?
1. Act as a home base for your shareable content
A blog can act as a home base for your shareable content. While it might seem easier to just write a post on Facebook and share it to Twitter from there (for example) keep in mind that you ultimately have no control over these platforms. If they are the home base for your content and for whatever reason your account is disabled or the rules of the platform change, you might be left with nothing. A blog is a central point from which information can easily be shared, linked back to and repurposed.
2. Build relationships & authority within your niche
A well written, useful, informative blog can help build relationships and authority within your niche. By consistently engaging with readers and providing good content, people will come to see you as a trusted resource – hopefully, one they would love to do business with!
3. Control the conversation about your brand
We all want people to talk about our brand, and we want them to say good things. A blog can be a place where you can acknowledge your evangelists and direct the conversation. If the discussion goes awry because of something you did, didn’t do or you’ve attracted the attention of a disgruntled person with a soapbox, your blog can give you a voice to acknowledge issues and take action to correct them.
4. Assist with search engine optimisation
The first three points relate to relationships and “people engagement optimisation” (PEO). This final point is all about search engine optimisation (SEO). A regularly updated, keyword optimised blog can help increase your visibility in search engine results. Bear in mind is that PEO is becoming more and more important to SEO all the time, so don’t make the mistake of forgoing one for the other.
Some questions to ask
Before jumping in and banging out your first post there are some questions that need to be asked.
The first is why do you want to include a blog. The answer to this question will guide nearly everything else about your blog. It should also raise more questions about how a blog would fit with the rest of your relationship building and marketing activities.
One final question is whether you can do your business justice by regularly offering value to your readers. I don’t mean value in the sense of business deals. Value could be a summary of a relevant business event, a review of a new product that will save your customers time, answering some common questions, an opinion piece about something affecting your market and so on.
Our post “6 questions to ask before starting a business blog” will help you drill down on what it takes to create a business blog that meets your goals.
Once you’ve answered these questions and decided that blogging is for you, it’s time to come up with a plan. This post from Social Media Examiner is a great starting point for creating a plan for your small business blog.
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