Does a small business really need a blog?
If you’re a small business owner, maybe you don’t even have a website yet. Do you really need a blog?
I’d say that small business owners need websites and blogs more than anyone. If you’ve tried to start a business you know how hard it can be to gain traction. You need to reach out to the maximum amount of potential customers, and having an online presence is a great way to do that. The reasons for having a website should be evident (anyone reading this blog probably already has an appreciation for what the internet means to a small business), but the reasons for having a blog may not be as immediately apparent.
A blog is a tool that allows you to quickly and easily publish content, and interact with your readers. The search engines treat each blog post as a separate web page, and therefore each post has the potential to appear in the search results pages. This means that adding blog posts is like adding new pages to your website. Since the search engines rank web pages (not web sites), the more pages you have on your site the easier it is for your potential clients to find you with any given search term.
As an example, suppose you own a pet store and have a website with pages about dogs, cats, tropical fish, etc. Someone doing a web search for “tropical fish” might have a good chance of finding your page (assuming it has proper search engine optimization, but that’s a topic for another post). If you also have a blog, and you write posts about ‘proper nutrition for tropical fish’, ‘breeding tropical fish’, ‘new tropical fish arrivals in our store’, etc… your website has a higher likelihood of being ‘found’ on a search for the term ‘tropical fish’. And when a visitor finds your blog post, they find your business.
The addition of interesting and useful content to your website through blog posts can also lead to community-building. Maybe a tropical fish enthusiast comments on your post about nutrition, and you begin an online discussion on the subject. Others may find the discussion through their own web searches and join in. One of them belongs to a large tropical fish breeder’s organization, and links to your site from her organization’s website. Soon your site traffic has tripled, you’ve made many valuable connections with people in your industry, and you’re becoming a ‘thought-leader’ on the subjects you post about.
Considering the benefits it can offer, a blog should be seriously considered as part of any small business’s marketing strategy.
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