Ten good reasons to blog

I’ve been talking to a few clients and contacts recently, offering feedback and helping them to find their blogging way. You might be a non blogger reading this, or perhaps someone like me with good intentions but who doesn’t blog as often as they should! So, why should businesses blog? What’s in it for them? To me it’s obvious that it’s a great way to promote and assist your business but if you need convincing here are 10 compelling reasons why your business should have a blog.

1. A blog forces you to think about what it is you do, the services and products that you offer and to seek out information and topics to write about – this keeps you fresh and sharp which is vital in business. It makes you consider what people might be interested in or need to know. If you also give seminars or offer talks as part of your marketing and business development the thought and research you put into developing and writing your blog can be reinvested in these areas – for example this article is the starting point for a seminar we hope to run on blogging for business in the coming months.

2. It helps you to be seen as an expert in your field – blogs are especially great for service providers who are essentially using their knowledge, talents and experience in a certain area as their product. Share and demonstrate your knowledge and people will build trust and respect for you.

3. You can build a community and following when you have a blog that people subscribe to. A well liked blog will gain comments and provoke discussions which add value to the readers experience and further increases your profile with them and their perception of you as an expert. You can use your blog to drive people to sign up for your newsletters, e-courses, seminars etc where you can further strengthen your relationship with this community.

4. Other than your time, a blog is a powerful FREE marketing tool. You can use free blogging software or, even better, can have a blog built into your current website, usually in a very cost effective way, which will then continue to add value to your site and your business for years to come.

5. You can increase your reach – one of the beauties of blog posts is that they can be shared via twitter, facebook, Linkedin and other social media and sharing software. This means that your blog posts and articles could reach a wider audience far beyond your existing contacts and can expose you to new prospects who you would otherwise not have come into contact with. Tweets about some of our blog posts have appeared in the timelines of literally thousands of people and not just in the UK. This in turn has increased the number of people who have gone on to read the blog and has also added numbers to our twitter followers.

6. Improve the SEO of your website – if you have an integrated blog, by adding new content which is categorised and which contains the keywords that your target market would be using to search, you can improve your search engine rankings and drive more visits to your blog and your website. If your blog is good and well read, other bloggers may link to it or add you to their blog list which creates valuable links.

7. Get feedback – whether that is through the comments generated by the readers, or through statistics on how many people read a post, retweeted it or shared it on other social media, by blogging you can see clearly what people think about different aspects of the services and products you offer and also what they seem to be most interested in and would like to find out more about. This can help you when deciding on business areas to focus on and what messages you should be communicating about what your business does.

8. Show yourself – we’re all humans and as the saying goes people buy from people. Your blog can help create a human contact with your company and demonstrate your personal values and brand as well as your professional one.

9. They can lead to press and media coverage. If you present your blog to journalists and others working in the media they may start to use it as a resource for information on a certain subject. At times they may call on you to give an opinion or comment or even provide a case study for them to use in their articles. This is especially so for those of you who have a very specialist or niche business or expertise and in turn this additional press coverage, with no effort on your behalf or PR company fees can have a positive effect on your business.

10. Generate sales – obvious really but the ultimate aim is that by blogging you will drive interest, exposure and therefore custom to your business. We have had sales that we can directly attribute to blog posts that we have written so we know that it works!

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