Blogs can be an amazing tool for small businesses to regularly engage with their customers, build a reputation online and build organic traffic. But a blog won’t make a shred of difference to your business if nobody reads it. The only way to make a blog work is to be disciplined about posting often (an issue we often face at Advisori), ensuring that the content adds value and making sure you are promoting the content you create.

It’s important to remember that a blog that hasn’t been updated in months can actually have a negative impact, making it look like you have gone out of business or don’t care about your website.

Why Small Businesses Should Start Blogging

Build trust with your customers

In the world of online, potential customers often have to take your website at face value and form a judgement on whether they want to do business with you. Having a blog allows you to demonstrate your expertise and communicate the value of your products and services to visitors. Generally, people who have come to your website to view a piece of useful content are far more likely to stay and engage with your business, rather than bounce off the page.

Organic website traffic and Lead Generation

You may have heard that blogs are a great opportunity to improve your search rankings in Google. While this is absolutely true, it is important to ensure that you are writing good content. Search engines are smart enough to understand whether an article is spammy or not and will adjust your sites rankings accordingly.

A great strategy can be to create one major piece of content a month that is incredibly useful to your customers. This should be published on your blog and pushed to every publishing channel you have to increase the likelihood of your customers and potential customers sharing it down the line. A single good piece of content can lead to press opportunities, increased search ranking and an influx of leads to your website.

Business development and staying at the top of your game

Blogging improves your business focus by requiring you to define your exact audience and develop content that your customers would find useful. It means that you are actively thinking about your customers and their challenges and constantly evaluating what your audience care about. A simple test to see whether you are writing about interesting and current things happening that may be relevant to your customers is to gauge your own excitement on writing about the topic. If you aren’t interested in the least, your blog post probably won’t be either.

How To Get Started in the World of Blogging

1. Create a content plan

This shouldn’t take long – take out a piece of piece of paper and do the following;

• Decide how often you will post on your blog. Weekly is often a good starting point.
• Brainstorm pieces of content you can write for the first month (four or five ideas). You can focus on common questions your clients/customers ask or look at your larger competitors to get an idea of what information people are engaging with.
• Outline a quick process that you will follow for each post. This might mean storing all of your ideas in a document, creating a draft, sending to a friend to check and then finding an image to post alongside your content.

2. Decide on publishing channels

Do you currently use social media for your business? Do you have all of your customer’s emails?

You need to think about how you can get your useful content to your audience. Email newsletters and social accounts can be an easy (and free) method to disseminate your blog posts but it is important to understand this could take a while to start catching on.

3. Start writing

The hardest part – just start writing. Like most things, blogging is something that gets a lot easier as you do it more and more. Set a date to start and focus on sticking to the schedule you set out in your content plan. This should continuously evolve over time as you understand what content types/information your audience is engaging with the most. Good luck!