There’s so much talk about blogging and writing articles for your website, but as a small business owner or sole trader, you might wonder why you’d spend time producing such content. Here are a few reasons why it’s a good investment.
Demonstrate Knowledge and Experience
When you’re representing your company, it can be difficult to showcase your expertise without engaging everyone in a lengthy conversation. But the clients visiting your website want information. They want to know what you’re selling and why they should buy from you. Consider it an opportunity for them to ‘interview’ you and get to know you, and understand how you participate in your trade.
Welcome Dialogue
Unless you’re disabling comments for a good reason, you may find that your visitors will be inclined to ask questions, offer suggestions, or provide feedback on your blog posts or related services. It’s great to encourage conversation and a closer connection with potential customers and helps to build rapport!
Google Loves Frequent Content Updates
Search engines, like Google and Bing, prefer sites which provide regular, relevant content updates. By writing and publishing consistently about topics pertinent to your industry, search engines will index your website more often, and you’ll gain higher SEO rankings than if you were only to use it as a ‘digital leaflet’. Comments count as updates, too, so encouraging communication with your visitors can go a long way to getting on that first page of results.
Guest Blogging as a Marketing Tool
Once you’ve established your blog and gained a little authority in your field, you might want to consider asking other blog websites if you could write for them. These might include companies who provide similar products to you but aren’t direct competitors, networking sites, or industry and interest-specific blogs. Stick with websites that are happy to give you proper credit for the article and a link back to your own domain. Readers who see your content might get curious about your background or want to read more of your content, so make it easy for them to find you without making it evident that you’re trying to market yourself.
Social Media Sharing
If you’re not sure how to effectively market yourself on Facebook or Twitter, you can use blog posts to get the ball rolling. When you’ve written, edited, and published your article, post a little introduction and a link to the page, and share it on both company and personal accounts. It’s an excellent way to let your network know what you’re offering without looking too shameless, and they may also share it with their network!
Support/FAQs
If you’ve got a topic that comes up a lot with your clients or a question that’s asked frequently and you can easily explain in an article, it can be helpful to publish a post to which you can later refer. This should be done politely, however, as you don’t want to appear dismissive, and it should be expected that they’ll have some questions afterwards. Used wisely, though, you can provide support to your customers quickly and efficiently.
I’m sure there are other ways that blogs can benefit your business, but here are a few good reasons to get started. Happy Blogging!
