Normally small businesses, understandably, have small budgets and that means having less money to spend on marketing and promotion. When you’re working on the Internet it is practically impossible to survive without promoting your business. This is because there is lots of competition on the Internet and this is because anybody with a decent Internet connection and a little bit of dedication can run a marginally successful business and just imagine what sort of competition you may have to face if there are, let us say, 15,000 businesses offering the same kind of service that you are offering.
Doing business on the Internet is all about visibility and credibility. People should be able to find you, they need to be familiar with you and after all this they should be able to trust you. Creating this kind of atmosphere is an ongoing exercise because again, everybody is continuously performing this exercise – at least those who are really serious about their business. Everybody is trying to stay ahead of the game whether it is search engine optimization, online marketing, or social media and networking websites. There are scores of channels you need to compete for.
This is where content writing can come to your rescue. Whatever is there on the Internet it is in the form of content: you have text, videos, images and interactive presentations everywhere and they are being generated and promoted in billions in number. The easiest among them is text, of course.
Content writing can be performed on your own or you can easily hire a content writer, and through content writing you can publish new content almost on a daily basis. This advantage is not there if you want to publishing video or graphic content unless you have the needed hardware, software and expertise.
Content writing benefits for small business
Search engines primarily focus on written content
The current search technology doesn’t enable search engines to look for keywords and such expressions among videos and images. You can use tags but they work only to a certain extent. Through content writing, on the other hand, you can create, keyword-rich content all day if you want to. You just need to know what you want to write about.
Even if you are unable to write yourself you can easily hire a content writer who is adept at writing for humans as well as search engines. It won’t cost you much. The more content you have on your website the more keywords and their different combinations and permutations you can cover. Of course it doesn’t mean you always create content according to search engines because eventually what matters the most is how your human visitors react to your content.
It is easier and cheaper to create written content
I know, I have already mentioned this above. But since this is also one of the factors that may affect your content decision it deserves a separate heading. Even if you have videos and images as your primary content you will need to resort to generating some search engine optimized textual content in order to enable the search engine crawlers to find and index (and then accordingly, rank) your content. Again, as I have already mentioned, you can either write content on your own or you can hire a content writer. I wouldn’t advise you to go for an extremely cheap content writer because then you will be compromising on the quality. I always suggest to my clients that go for less, if you have to, but don’t compromise on quality.
Your written content helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field
You can continuously interact with your visitors through your written content. Share your knowledge, your wisdom and your experience with your visitors so that they feel enriched when they visit your website. The more they read and accept your writing the more they trust you and the more they trust you the more eager they are to do business with you. Again, it is an ongoing process because you constantly need to attract new visitors to your website/blog and you cannot achieve this by having a fixed number of pages or blog posts.
You seed new thoughts on your social media and networking profiles
Whenever you publish new written content on your website/blog you can post your links to your social media and networking profiles and invite comments from your friends and followers. This will give rise to lively interactions whether they agree with you or not and this will help generate buzz around your product or service. Although you can keep your social media and networking streams live by finding interesting and compelling content from other sources and posting it, sometimes you also need to post your own, unique content in order to become an authority in your subject.
You get lots of back links from other websites
Just as you find interesting and useful content on other websites and post it to your social media and networking streams or link to it from your own website/blog, so do other Internet users. People are constantly looking for new and interesting content to share with their friends and followers through their social media and networking accounts and blogs. They may also like to use your content to add value to their own content: if you already have a good explanation of “SEO content” they may as well directly link to it instead of writing it from scratch.
As you can see, there are lots of benefits of content writing for small businesses.