Are you still wondering what are the advantages of having a business blog? You may find yourself facing this question especially when you’re planning to invest time and money in this particular aspect of your online marketing effort and just like any other function of the business, you have to decide what are the advantages and disadvantages of having a business blog.

The advent of social media has definitely disillusioned some people. Many have started claiming from the rooftops that the days of blogging are numbered. They actually don’t understand blogging. You see, blogging was never a fad. Social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter may go tomorrow, and an alternative may surface, but blogging is going to remain there. I used to maintain a blog even when the term hadn’t been defined and one needed to upload blog posts as individual HTML pages.

Listed below are the 7 advantages of having a business blog.

Improved search engine rankings

When you want to know the biggest advantages of having a business blog, this one often gets the first spot among business owners. Good search engine rankings matter to every business because it’s the targeted traffic that helps you do business on the web. Improved search engine rankings can help you bring down your search engine marketing costs considerably. Just imagine if you’re paying per click on Google Adwords how much money you must be spending for, say, 200 clicks. The same 200 clicks can be obtained, practically free of cost, if your blog can help you improve your search engine rankings.

When you have a business blog you constantly create content on specific topics and this automatically improves your keyword density in a natural manner. When you create truly relevant and useful blog posts you begin to get targeted traffic for not just shorter keywords and key phrases, but also longtail expressions.

Aside from quality content, search engines like Google also consider your popularity while ranking your links. This popularity can be gauged by the number of people linking back to your website and blog, and the level of engagements that you have with people on various social networking websites. If more people share your content on their websites and blogs your search engine rankings improve. If the content that you post on your social networking timelines gets promoted by other people, your search engine rankings improve then too.

By constantly providing valuable content you encourage people to promote your links directly and indirectly.

Greater social reach

No matter how many messages you exchange on your Facebook and Twitter timelines, unless you create authoritative blog posts and then share their links you cannot make much impact. If all the time you are promoting someone else’s links, you are just doing what others are doing. Having your own blog allows you to share your knowledge, wisdom and experience with your visitors and your social networking friends in depth. It’s no use creating longer posts on Facebook and Google Plus and generating quality content for them, why not do it for your own blog?

When you publish quality content on your own blog, you also provide an opportunity to your followers and friends to promote your links rather than promoting someone else’s.

Educated and aware customers and clients

This is one of the greatest advantages of having a business blog, and this is where your actual conversion rate improves. When you constantly educate your customers and clients and provide them the information they need, they are always going to do business with you rather than someone who always seems aloof. People don’t like always being told what they should buy. They want to make these decisions on their own, or based on the recommendations of their friends and people they trust. You can become someone they trust by continuously providing them relevant and topical information.

Community and brand building

Businesses and brands that have thriving communities built around them enjoy a solid customer base. How can you build a community around your business? By constantly engaging your visitors. You can do that by posting interactive content on your business blog and then encouraging your visitors to leave their feedback. The more you are able to do that, the more reasons they have to visit your blog multiple times and consequently, develop an affinity for your presence.

The advantage of developing your own community is that people don’t just talk about your business and brand on your own blog, they also do it on various other forums and social networking websites, providing you free publicity in the process.

Have your own PR channel

Is your business attracting negative publicity? Do not let the press depend on random sources, provide all the information on your blog so that later on nobody can deny what you said or misquote you.

Easy to maintain

Despite tremendous advantages of having a business blog, it is very easy to maintain. Once it is setup, just a training of a couple of hours can enable all your employees to use your blog to create fresh content. Here is an advise that may cost me some business, but it will help you. There are many businesses who train their present employees to write for their business blog instead of hiring a dedicated content writer. This is because, who would know the business better than they do? Anyway, the point is, it is extremely easy to set up and maintain a blog.

Easily brand-able

You don’t need to use the default theme of the blog that comes with your typical blogging software like WordPress. You can easily create a blog theme that looks just like your business website with a little help from someone who knows how to use style sheets and a little bit of PHP.

So this was a list of 7 advantages of having a business blog. Do you have some more advantages in your mind? Do mention them in the comments section.

Here is a small video describing the 7 advantages of having a business blog: