By now, everyone is familiar with socal networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Businesses and business owners are flocking to these sites to promote their companies and their brands. And with socal networking all the rage, blogging has become the forgotten stepchild of web marketing for small business. But this doesn’t make sense.
Blogging can be one of the most effective marketing tools for the small business owner because it’s easy to start, it’s easy to maintain, and it’s easy to leverage in enhancing your marketing mix. Here are some reasons why you should consider a blog for your company.
Improve Search Engine Rankings
Google, Yahoo and Bing LOVE blogs. They’re indexed almost overnight, and usually rank high in the search engine results. This helps you drive more qualified traffic to your website.
Engage with Prospective Customers
Blogging presents a unique opportunity to engage in dialog with your prospective customers on a continual basis. Anytime a new prospect visits your blog, you immediately leverage the vast arsenal of posts, comments and writing to help sell your products or services.
Dig Deeper
The pace of business is fast. Blogging is an opportunity to dig into a particular subject a little deeper without slowing down. You can write an extended blog post, or you can break up your thoughts into a dozen posts related to a particular topic.
Improve Your Writing Skills
One of the biggest benefits to blogging is the opportunity to improve your writing skills. Ideally, you’re going to post several times a week – frequent writing and editing means your writing skills will improve – which helps the rest of your marketing efforts, too.
Be Unique
Let’s face it – most business marketing materials like company brochures are incredibly boring. Blogging lets you put a little personality into your marketing. Customers and prospects get to see the real you, and your uniqueness could be the difference between you winning the business, and your competitor winning.
Listen and Learn
Read all the blog comments and email you receive, and read the comments on other blogs about your writings. Learn what your customers and prospects are thinking.
Test Ideas
Innovation is the engine that drives business growth. A blog is an excellent platform to test thoughts and ideas in a risk-free environment.
Become An Expert
Prove your expertise to new prospective customers with your knowledge and insights.
Supplement Your Other Marketing
Support your other marketing investments by leveraging your blog for promotion, marketing and feedback.
Get Subscribers
Many readers who like what you write will subscribe to your blog, providing you with a direct, ongoing communications channel with your target audience.
Uncover New Opportunities
The more you blog, the more opportunities will present themselves to you. You’ll gain a reputation as an expert in your field, which means clients and prospects are already sold on your ability to deliver results.
Tech Experts maintains two blog sites for our clients. The first, www.ExpertsGuys.com, is a blog written and maintained by our technical staff. It offers interesting ideas and timely technical advice based on our daily service work.
My blog at www.ExpertTechTips.com offers some of my insights on small business computing with an eye toward growing your company.
We offer a blog hosting package, that will work alongside your existing website. For example, if your website was at www.MyTechExperts.com, we could set up a blog site for you at blog.MyTechExperts.com (or at any domain name you’d like).
If you’re interested in learning more about blogging, or would like to set up a blog site for your business, please give us a call at (734) 457-5000.