When you visit a blog page put out by a small business, you’ll find industry-relevant articles. For example, a vehicle repair shop may have a blog where they publish articles about car maintenance. On our blog, we post articles that would be of interest to any small business owner with an online presence.
You might be thinking to yourself, “Do I really need a blog for my small business?” and the answer to that is yes. There are actually a lot of advantages to having your own small business blog. We are going to cover those advantages in this article.
The benefits of having a small business blog
It adds value to your website
One of the main reasons why you want to start a small business blog on your site is because it helps add value. A lot of small business websites tend to be very generic and uninspired. Having a generic site will result in visitors (and potential customers) quickly clicking away and visiting a different site. We’ve written before about how to increase website traffic, but if you don’t have any content on your website worth reading, then it doesn’t matter how many visitors you get. The reason for this is because most of them will leave before they even check out your services.
It proves that you know what you’re talking about
Customers are always skeptical about trying out a business for the first time. This is even truer when it comes to small businesses because they don’t have the advertising power of larger companies and thus, people are less familiar with them. This article explains how brands connect with their most skeptical customers.
Posting articles from your expert point of view will help convince visitors that you know what you’re talking about. For example, a local burger restaurant may have trouble attracting new customers because the locals are wary about spending money on a restaurant that could potentially serve bad food. But, if the burger restaurant had a blog where they shared delicious recipes, it could help convince their potential customers to try their delicious looking food.
It can help with marketing
Any small business owner knows that one of their biggest challenges is competing with larger companies. Big companies often have massive marketing budgets which far exceed anything a regular small business has. With that being said, small businesses must take every possible opportunity in order to get their name out there. This is where blogs come in to play. See, people on social media won’t just share your website URL. Sure, it can happen, but the vast majority of people who like or share content on social media do so thinking their friends will be interested in it.
If you have a blog section on your site, getting links to your website is much easier since people are more likely to share a blog post (as opposed to your homepage) on social media. People love sharing interesting articles with catchy titles. If you have a lot of articles on your blog titled “x ways to do y,” or “top ten x,” a lot of people may share those articles with their friends. Hubspot produced an excellent article on how you can write a catchy blog titles.
Having interesting blog posts will essentially amount to free advertising on social media. The more people that share your posts, the more exposure your website gets.
It helps with SEO
SEO (which for those who don’t know, stands for search engine optimization) is what Google and other search engines use to determine how easy it is for people to find your website in search results. The websites which are constantly updated with new content are favored by search engines when it comes to keyword rankings. So, running a blog and adding new posts to it a few times each month is a great way of boosting your site’s position on Google and other search engines.
It can increase your sales
Blogs are a great way to advertise your services. A well-written blog article can be just as effective as a few advertisements. They allow you to mention your services to readers without really making it clear that you’re selling things to them. For example, let’s say you run a small car washing business, and as part of your business, you sell car maintenance items such as car wax. You can write a blog post about how every car owner needs this special kind of car wax. Then, at the end of your blog post, you can link to your car wax product page. If you don’t sell products online, make it clear that you sell that particular item in your store and people might buy it.
Conclusion
Begin blogging today! By now you probably understand how useful blogs are for small business websites. Despite the obvious benefits, there’s still a lot of small business owners who don’t have a blog on their website. So, by starting your own blog, you can have an advantage over your non-blogging competitors.
If you’re interested in blogging, we can help. As part of our website services, we’ll install a blog page on your website so that you can easily publish your own articles.
