8 Reasons Your Small Business Should Blog

Oftentimes when online marketers discuss how to help small businesses we focus so heavily on hitting home runs that we forget about the base hits.  And don’t get me wrong its wonderful for small businesses to utilize high octane Internet marketing tactics such as findability, SEM, Online PR, social media, and the like because when properly implemented these tools can yield amazing results.

Nonetheless, if your business is participating in heavy firepower web marketing techniques but leaving out blogging you’re still missing out.  So if you’ve ever wanted to know why your business should consider starting a blog, then this post is for you.

Why Every Business Needs a Blog?

1. Establish Your Brand as the Authority.  By writing about the topic(s) that your business specializes in overtime your readers will come to view you as the expert on that particular topic.  This is actually one of the branding tenets presented by Al and Laura Ries in the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.
2. SEO Friendly.  On the surface inserting links to external sources may seem counter intuitive to newer bloggers.  The good news though is that when you reward your readers with relevant content, you in turn stand to be rewarded with increased exposure-both from your readers and the bloggers that you link to in your posts.
3. Build a Community Around Your Blog.  When your business blog publishes content around topics that are near and dear to you as an entrepreneur and interesting thing begins to happen.  You begin to attract followers that include prospective clients, friends, industry professionals, and so on who are genuinely passionate about your content.
4. Build a Web Presence-Affordably.  If you consider that your typical blogging profile that you’d set up on platforms such as Blogger and WordPress.com are free then you can see that blogging is probably the most affordable web presence building tools in existence.  Even if you went hard core- hosting the blog yourself, getting add-ons, and then paying someone to write 20 posts/month then you’re still probably shelling out no more than 200 USD/month.
5. Expand Beyond Your Borders.  Blogging can help to expand your audience beyond your business’s local borders.  So if your business sells a product or service that can be sold nationally or internationally, then blogging can help you to get in front of an entirely new market.
6. Keeps You in the Know.  One of the things that blogging forces us to do is to continue creating more content.   A great way to consistently have new content for your blog is to stay abreast of industry trends
7. Easy Setup.  With blogging you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.  Unlike building a website from scratch building a blog is often as simple as creating a profile and selecting a template-this is a process that be done in as little as five or ten minutes.  Once you’ve done that you should be on your way.
8. Potential to Go Viral.  Although this is something that’s often out of your control great blog content does have the potential to “go viral” meaning that what starts as a small trickle of conversational activity around one of your blog posts can continue being shared via social bookmarking or through other bloggers linking to you until you’ve got an explosion of traffic and comments around that one article.

There is one piece of advice that I’d like to share with you regarding how you go about building your business blog.  As you begin putting things together you’ll want to focus as much as possible on developing your own consistent voice that’s easily recognizable and that resonates with your audience.

If you can do this a magical thing will happen-not only will your audience find you but they will share your passion.

Happy blogging!

Benin Brown is a recent graduate of Full Sail University’s Internet Marketing Master’s degree program.  Benin is an emarketer for an Atlanta based ecommerce retailer and blogs at http://www.beninbrown.com.