I am a big believer of the benefits of maintaining a blog for local and small businesses. Often times a properly maintained blog will out perform older, more established, and higher page rank sites and drive targeted traffic to your business. There are some disadvantages too which I will briefly discuss in a second. But here are 6 benefits of blogs for local business:
Benefits of Blogging for Local Business
- Search engines (especially google) love websites that have content added to them regularly.
- Adding pages increases your page rank and increases likelihood of all your pages being found in search results.
- Providing accurate and useful information to your industry builds up the perception that you are a thought leader and somebody worth listening to (i.e. social proof).
- A blog makes a great hub for interacting with crucial web2.0 properties like twitter, facebook, and Youtube. There are SO MANY good free plugins created for blogs to take advantage of this fact. The interactivity with these properties will also drive a lot of relevant traffic to your web site as well.
- Good business blogs tend to attract regular returning visitors naturally, especially if you solve a problem for them. These visitors can be converted into customers at some point in the future.
- A blog can be properly configured with landing pages designed to create leads and customers for your business.
Disadvantages of Blogging for Small Business
OK great, so those items sound like they could really benefit your business. So what are the disadvantages?
- Time cost – I’m not going to mislead you, the biggest disadvantage of maintaining a blog is the time investment involved. Someone has to research, aggregate, rewrite, think of original angles, and post all that information. If you don’t have time to do it yourself then you need to pay a decent researcher / writer to do it for you. So either way it is a significant cost.
- Once you start blogging you really should continue to add content on a predictable schedule, either daily, weekly, monthly. Whatever you choose you should stick with it. So there is a commitment factor involved here.
Conclusion
If you are serious about long top rankings in google, and becoming a strong brand on the internet then you really should be maintaining a blog in some form or another. It doesn’t have to be wordpress, you could for instance base your efforts on free platforms like Tumblr or Squidoo. But ideally you should control content that exists on a domain under your full control. There is a cost involved in blogging, but consider the massive benefits that could achieved for your small or local business.
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