Amanda Clark — January 20, 2017 Follow @GrammarChicInc
As a small business owner, you’ve undoubtedly got a lot on your plate. What’s more, you understand the importance of protecting your time: Everything you do during the course of your day needs to add value to your company, and anything that doesn’t fit that criteria is ultimately wasted effort. It’s for this reason that some business owners excuse themselves from blogging, assuming it to be something that’s ornamental at best, pointless at worst.
Actually, though, you might be surprised by how much utility can be gained from a well-maintained business blog. Plus, you don’t even have to handle the blogging yourself: There’s always the option of outsourcing it to ghostbloggers, like the pros at Grammar Chic.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s consider just some of the ways in which a blog can benefit your business—some of the ways in which it is most definitely not a waste of your time. Here are five of them.
Blogging Turns Your Website into an Invaluable Resource
Ultimately, you want your website to be a hub of information—a place where customers can have their questions answered, their pain points addressed, and their problems solved. You want to position yourself as an authority, and your products and services as remedies for what’s ailing them. A blog can help with this. Your company blog posts can authoritatively address common questions, provide product how-tos, list the benefits of your services, or explain how your industry works in a way that will resonate with consumers. The upshot? Consumers who are better informed, more trusting, and more likely to feel confident moving forward with a purchase.
Blogging Helps You Improve Your Website’s Google Ranking
We like to tell our clients that Google is a monster that constantly needs to be fed. That is to say, Google’s search engine algorithms are always prowling for fresh content, and the websites that rank the best are the ones that are updated regularly with fresh, value-adding content. A business blog is the single best way to regularly add content to your site, and thus can help you rank better and improve your visibility among search engine users.
Your Blog Can Be Repurposed for LinkedIn Pulse, Too
LinkedIn’s publishing platform, called Pulse, has quickly become one of the truly invaluable tools for establishing thought leadership. We use Pulse on behalf of our own company as well as many of our clients, and we’ve found it to be a significant source of website traffic, online shares, and more. What’s more, it can help you build credibility among your peers and name recognition within your industry. Best of all, you can use your regular company blog posts as LinkedIn Pulse fodder—another reason why blogging can be beneficial.
Blog Posts Make Great Email Marketing Content
Email marketing is still one of the most powerful and direct ways of reaching out to clients, but the challenge many business owners face is knowing what to say in their emails. Effective email marketing provides the reader with something of real value, and sending a link to a particularly substantive blog post is a great way to provide your email subscribers with something that’s free as well as useful—which is in turn great for improving your customer loyalty and engagement.
You Can Share Blogs on Social Media, Too
Finally, note that a good social media account includes both curated and original content; finding content from other sources is easy enough, but what will you do for original social media posts? The obvious answer is to share your blog posts, a smart way to keep your Facebook and Twitter followers in the loop.
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