The benefits of business blogging

Improving your search engine position, and adding ‘stickiness’ to your website is nowhere near as difficult as saying that three times fast!

Content on your website is the easiest way to attract visitors through organic (i.e. non paid) search results online.  Most small business owners consider a blog to be beyond their reach through complexity or simply that it would be a waste of time and effort.

Well, for one thing it’s never a waste of time to be writing about your business online.  The more you write the more relevant terms and phrases you introduce “in context” to your website and the more relevant you become to visitors.  Yes not all of these new found visitors will turn into paying customers but it still increases the chances that someone looking for your product or service will find you over the competition.

And as for blogging being complicated, it’s only as complicated as you want it to be.  Obviously if you want to make your blog a major part of your website (and I do recommend it being part of your main website rather than independent) then you need to be updating it regularly with interesting content otherwise it will make your site look neglected and put people off.  But if you start small, and go for a news style page with 4 or 5 blog entries per page and use photo’s to illustrate your blog posts you can achieve great results with only a post or two a month.

Things to Remember

• Spell check, proof read and then spell check again – sloppy spelling loses sales
• Don’t be pushy – by all means include product or service details but don’t oversell
• Be creative – you don’t have to stick to a single theme, if you have a view on something related to your industry blog about it
• Don’t rant – whatever you do don’t be negative about the competition regardless of how tempting it might be