Blogging for small businesses is one of the easiest (and cheapest) ways to accomplish just about any revenue, branding, or growth goals you could think of. Almost every major corporation is now utilizing business blogs to compete in the online world and there’s a few very good reasons for it.
- Every single blog post can drive organic traffic to your page. More organic traffic means more potential leads and sales.
- Blogs position you as a thought leader in your industry. That’s a different discussion entirely but for more on this, Forbes published a great article in February I highly recommend.
- Blogging for small businesses can help solidify the most important aspect of their market: brand loyalty.
We’ll be discussing some of the finer details in a moment, but first let’s address the ‘why’s’ behind small business blogs.
Small Businesses Need Exposure
Your first thought is probably “duh”, but let me explain here. Every business wants general exposure through press or word of mouth, but the key to drumming up new clients online is exposing yourself to brand new niches.
I talk a lot about primary markets in my post about restaurant branding if you want some more info, but I’ll touch on it again very briefly. The largest, most obvious target audience for your business is what I call your ‘primary market’. Basic professional SEO work should get your website visible to these audiences with a bit of time and TLC. This is important, of course, if you plan on being an industry leader. This being said, if you stop there you’re leaving enormous amounts of potential customers or leads untouched.
Let’s pretend you are a local music store. Of course you want to be one of the first pages that pops up when someone searches for ‘music stores (your hometown)’. Reeling this traffic in is your website’s job. But what about the more specific search phrases? When we do blogging for small businesses, this becomes a huge part of our strategic approach.
You must also hook the people that are searching for ‘used guitars (your hometown)’ or ‘instrument rentals (your hometown)’. Furthermore, someone searching for advice on picking out or cleaning an instrument, choosing strings, etc. is someone you could potentially turn into a client. A great example of this is a piece I wrote for Larusso’s music blog about how to promote your music. The piece offers helpful information to a new niche that otherwise wouldn’t have landed on the page.
*If you do online sales, the beautiful thing about this is that you can reach a national audience quickly, even though you’re local.*
Whether you’re blogging for small businesses or fortune 500 companies, this element is essential.
Content is the Key
When you’re doing blogging for small businesses, the first thing you figure out is that the key to success is having a ton of content. The more shareable content you can churn out, the more keywords you can rank for. Most importantly, it keeps traffic going to your site at all times. No, it’s not easy but it is possible and incredibly important to success.
This guy knows what I’m talking about.
Let’s put things in perspective. When you want advice about a specific topic or you want to see what’s going on in the news world, you probably have a few go-to sites. I’m willing to bet that 9/10 times you’ve found these sites from someone sharing content or doing a generic search. This is the kind of marketing potential your business has when you’ve got a blog rich with information and engaging content.
When I’m doing long-term blogging for small businesses, I try to identify any consumer interests that are relevant to my client’s product or service. Doing this makes increasing organic traffic simple and effective.
Why Hired Professionals are Blogging for Small Businesses
Some of you are tech savvy, go-getting entrepreneurs who are more than capable of taking on this task alone. Many of you, however, may feel like your brain has been fried a little bit. Don’t worry, that’s ok. Most small business owners have decided to outsource the work to industry professionals.
The plain and simple truth is that for less than the cost of 1 month of printed ad space, you could hire an SEO or blogging firm to create content that can reach larger markets and never stops running. For this reason, it has enormous ROI potential for entrepreneurs who are investing their marketing budgets in online services.
Premier SEO Services does a lot, but we specialize in blogging for small businesses that want to expand their customer base. If you need help putting applying these techniques to your business, contact us now. We’d love to hear from you!
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