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Why should your small business publish a blog: 5 reasons

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5 reasons you should blog as a small business

Although every business should publish a blog, a blog can be really beneficial for a small business. 5 reasons why your small business should publish a blog are:

  1. Most of the small businesses are publishing a blog, you are at a disadvantage if you are not publishing one.
  2. Blog publishing can improve your search engine rankings organically, so you need to spend less money on advertisement as a small business.
  3. Publishing a blog helps you build your brand – people recognize you for the quality of your content and the frequency with which they come across useful content from your blog.
  4. It allows you to share your expertise and establish yourself as an authority.
  5. It helps you build a platform for yourself where you can communicate important messages to your customers and clients.

Although millions of blogs are published everyday, surprisingly, many small business owners still don’t consider blogging as an important part of doing business online. The thing that it is just a novelty, or a marketing tactic used by big businesses.

Big businesses have this habit of poking their noses everywhere simply because they have lots of money and resources at their beck and call. So, when this in millions of people blogging, they also want to blog. There is nothing wrong in that. But yes, every major business has a blog these days.

Big businesses having blogs doesn’t mean small businesses cannot publish their own blogs and experience success through them. In fact, there is a greater chance of them being succeeding through business blogging because a small business has more flexibility to publish highly engaging and conversational content.

This sort of flexibility is not available to big businesses. Big business waste lots of bureaucratic and legal hurdles that small businesses don’t face.

Another advantage that small businesses have is that they can be more personal and direct with their audience. They can individually engage with people on their blog.

Let’s throw some more light on the 5 reasons why your small business to publish a blog.

1. Most of the small businesses are publishing a blog

Whether you are publishing a blog or not, your competitors definitely are. Visit the website of any of your competitors and you will notice a “Blog” link. It’s another matter of frequently they are updating their blog, but they definitely have a blog.

A slightly old post, but this MarketingProfs blog Post says that 2 million blog posts are written everyday. These are 2015 numbers.

Don’t get bogged down by the numbers because the same post also tells you how to stand out even when so many people are publishing blogs.

The point is, Google is hungry for content. It is constantly looking for new content. When you publish a business blog you are creating new content. You are giving new content to Google to index.

This makes Google happy. But we will come to that later.

Under this point, what I mean to say is, whether you like it or not, all your small business competitors are using content to outsmart each other and when you are in the reckoning, outsmart you.

Remember when people used to ponder whether they should have a website or not and then there came a time when the option no longer remained whether they should have a website or not but what type of website they should have?

The same goes with publishing a blog for your small business. The issue is not whether you should publish a small business blog or not, the issue should be what sort of content you should publish.

2. Publishing a blog has a big impact on your search engine rankings

A blog is exactly what the search engines are looking for. It is supposed to have fresh content regularly. A blog is always published around a clean – this is a content writing and a content marketing blog. This way, Google has an idea what sort of content for when it is crawling and indexing your individual blog posts.

Google wants fresh content. Although the primary stress is on quality, it prefers new content. This is why you are not publishing blog posts, you should keep updating your existing blog posts.

Content that is written in the form of questions and answers, and problems and solutions enjoys better search engine rankings. Your blog posts are a perfect way to create content in this format.

A blog post, typically, has a title that is search engine friendly. It organizes various bits of content in such a manner that it is easier for Google to crawl your content.

Interconnecting various blog posts makes it easier to find deeper content crawling your blog and website.

Regularly publishing blog small business gives search engines like Google to crawl and index your website and blog with greater frequency.

I have observed that since I publish regularly on my blog, sometimes my blog posts begin to appear on the search engine result page within a couple of minutes.

Many small businesses publish a blog daily for this reason. Once Google begins to call website with greater frequency even your business pages get crawled quickly.

For better SEO you need to get back links from good, trusted websites. People should link to your voluntarily, due to your content.

Your small business blog gives them a reason to link to you, consequently, improving your search engine ranking.

Another reason why publishing a blog is good for your small business is, as you keep on writing on your area of expertise or business, the keyword density for that subject keeps on increasing for your website or blog.

3. Publishing your blog builds your brand

My previous blog post was about how to build your brand with content marketing and a business blog is one of the most essential building blocks of your content marketing strategy.

On the Internet, content is not just king, but the entire kingdom. Whether it is social networking websites, your own website or blog, everything is content.

Whatever you access on the Internet, in digital format, is content. Even your email is content.

Every sort of content is vying for the attention of your target customers. Even non-related content can take their attention away from your business.

If there is so much distraction on the Internet, how do people identify your business?

How do they distinguish your business from someone else’s business?

Through the content you publish on your blog.

They recognize you through the quality, through the relevance, and through the timeliness of your content.

People begin to recognize your brand when they repeatedly come across your quality blog content on the search engines, on social media and social networking websites, and on the websites that link to your blog.

4. Establish yourself as an expert or an authority

Through your small business blog you can share your expertise and let people know that you have deep knowledge of your subject.

A small business normally depends on the reputation of the business owner. If people like you, if they appreciate the sort of information share with them, they do business with you more eagerly.

When you share your expertise and experience with them it doesn’t just provide them valuable information, it also tells them that you are an authority on your subject and hence, you are in a better position to handle the work than you competitors might not be sharing their own expertise or, may not be sharing it as effectively as you are.

5. Build a platform for your small business

Having your own platform can be one of the most potent communications tool your small business can ever have. Just imagine, own audience waiting to hear from you.

When you publish everyday, or at least when you follow a publishing routine, you begin to build an audience. The more content you publish, the more targeted your audience becomes.

Gradually only those people begin to come to your blog who are really interested in reading your content. This way, you build a platform for your small business.

The benefit of building a platform is when you have something to say, something important, there are people to listen to you.

Every political party builds its own platform. Business houses have their own magazines. Bigger businesses even buy newspapers and TV channels so that they have their own broadcasting platform.
How can a small business aspired to build a platform and even have a use of such a platform, you may think.

Don’t get too bogged down by the word “platform”. Even if 10 people regularly visit your blog and pay attention to what you have to say, you have got yourself a platform. The thing is, somewhere you have to make a beginning and publishing a blog is one of the best ways of doing it.

Another reason why a small business should publish a blog is that, publishing a blog is very easy. I mean, it is not as easy as posting something on Facebook or Twitter, but compared to setting up a website, setting up a blog is very easy.

Before you proceed, you may like to read How much does it cost to set up a complete WordPress blog?

The Medium blog publishing platform is also quite good although, I always advise my clients for a self-hosted business blog because then the whole content belongs to you.

Having said that, Medium has a very nice way of promoting your content. It has got a very big audience and you can start building traffic to your individual blog posts really fast. Then, this traffic and trickle onto your own blog. So, have a mix.
Start publishing a blog for your small business today. Thank me after a couple of months, I’m quite patient in that regard.

Why quality content writing matters and how to maintain quality

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Importance of quality content for your business blog

Do you think quality content writing matters? As a business vying to promote yourself through the power of content marketing, how seriously do you take the quality of content that you publish on your blog or website?

As a professional content writer I am routinely approached by clients looking for highly cheap content. This is also because they think that if they suddenly publish lots of content covering every possible keyword their search engine rankings will improve, but at the same time, they either don’t have the needed budget or they don’t have the inclination to spend enough money on getting the content written (because they aren’t sure whether it is going to work or not). Since they don’t want to spend much money on the content (due to whatever reason) they are often fine with publishing inferior-quality content, thinking that once people are drawn to their website, somehow they will end up doing business with them (the same sort of people are fine with spamming people with emails). Unfortunately (unfortunately for them, fortunately for people who take content writing seriously and would like to maintain a reasonable level of quality) this rarely works and even if lots of people end up on their websites, very few actually do business with them.

Regular interactions on social media and social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may give you an impression that people aren’t much worked up about what sort of grammar you use while expressing yourself. In fact, people who care about grammar in casual conversations are often termed as “Grammar Nazis”. Then why does quality content writing matter especially when it comes to promoting your business and generating leads and sales?

In the business world, quality means seriousness. If you are putting effort in producing quality content writing, it shows that you are serious about your business, and you also respect your customers and clients. If you don’t respect them, you don’t care about the sort of language they are exposed to. If you are not serious about getting business from them, you’re not going to spend much effort and money on getting quality content for your website and blog. You are fine with publishing mediocre content because you anyway have no confidence in your business. This is the message that you send when you neglect quality content writing.

So it has got nothing to do with how well you can write and what an impression you can make on your customers and clients. It is about conveying a message that you take your business very seriously, you take your customers and clients very seriously, and this is why, whatever it is they come across on your website, it is of high quality. When you respect your website visitors (or email recipients) it means you respect your own business and when you respect your own business, you take utmost care that whatever is present on your website is of good quality.

How to maintain the quality of content writing on your blog, website and emails

You can take care of the following in case you want to publish quality content:

  • Hire a professional content writer if you are not comfortable with the language you need to write in.
  • Avoid excessive use of jargon.
  • Always keep the central purpose of your writing in your mind if you are writing yourself and instruct your content writer to do the same in case he or she is writing content for you.
  • Although you don’t need to be a “grammar Nazi” be mindful of your grammar and don’t commit mistakes that reek of carelessness and ill-education.
  • Try to write in the language of the persona you are targeting.
  • Do proper research when writing.
  • Use a conversational style.
  • Continuously solve problems of your prospective and current customers and clients when writing content for your website or blog.
  • Use proper formatting such as headlines and bulleted points to organise main points of your content to make browsing and scanning easier for your readers.
  • Use interlinking (hyper linking to other important pages and blog posts on your website) to avoid content duplication if you need to explain a single point from within multiple pages and blog posts.
  • Try to deal with just one topic on one web page or blog post.
  • Use smaller paragraphs whenever possible and express just one idea.
  • Use images that help your readers understand your content better.
  • Thoroughly proof read before publishing.

Still not blogging? Here are the 10 reasons you should

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Reasons to have a business blog

“There are actually people who are not blogging for their business!” exclaimed one of my social media marketing clients recently who often outsources his content writing needs to me. Sometimes you get across the advice “blogging isn’t for everybody” and people end up interpreting it all wrong.

When someone tells you “blogging isn’t for everybody” it doesn’t mean your business doesn’t require blogging. What it means is, not everybody can handle the level of commitment required to run a successful business blog. Having said that, yes, there are many businesses that don’t require a blog and still experience lots of success but then there are many people who can spend 5 minutes underwater without running out of breath and drowning themselves – exceptions are always there and if you want to be an exception, well, it is your choice.

While you may have your own reasons not to have a business blog, here is a nice link that gives you 10 reasons why you should. Some of the reasons are…

  1. Make money: In one of my recent LinkedIn blog posts I wrote there are different ways you can make money from your blog and you don’t always have to rely on third-party advertisement networks. So yes, if you want to make money, blogging is one of the best ways to do it, though it requires lots of hard work and commitment.
  2. Become a better writer: A good thing about blogging is you don’t have to mind much about how you write. It doesn’t mean you run amok and use whatever sort of language you want to use, but you can relax and let your guards down. What am I saying? Instead of becoming a better writer, am I advising you to become a worse writer because nobody is judging your writing on your blog? No, what I’m saying is, on your blog you can write without fear so it can be a good writing practice. Business blog, on the other hand, needs to be professionally written but still, it can have your personal touch.
  3. Build an audience and also your own broadcasting platform: Once you start publishing a blog regularly people will start coming to your blog regularly. This will help you build an audience and wherever there is an audience, there is a broadcasting platform. You can use this platform to build your brand and hence, your business.
  4. Become an expert in your field: Provided you are serious about your business blog, you will be constantly sharing your expertise and in order to share your expertise, sometimes first you need to gain that expertise. Sometimes I learn new content writing and content marketing concepts while gathering material for my blog posts.
  5. Get new customers and clients: People who regularly come to your blog trust you more compared to those who don’t. Many among your regular blog readers will gladly become your paying customers and clients provided you have something valuable to sell.
  6. Improve your search engine rankings: Well, this point is not present in the link above, but this is one of the main reasons why most of my clients approach me to write content for their blogs – they want to improve their search engine rankings and yes, a business blog can definitely help you achieve that. This is because when you have a blog, you eventually end up creating lots of focused content and it is the focused content that enjoys higher search engine rankings.

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