Small businesses need all the tools they can possibly get to increase their visibility in the market. Even if some people are skeptical about using it for small businesses, a business blog is an equally useful marketing tool just like social media, email marketing, among others. Using blogs draws attention to whatever products you are offering. Business blogging is as important a tool as is website optimization.

If you are thinking of starting a blog for your business, then you are on the right track. Blogging and publication of content will grow your business in ways you could never have imagined. A skillfully written blog will increase leads, search visibility and sales. When the blog is hosted on the business website, all these benefits will be realized without spending a lot of money like you would by procuring other complex marketing tools.

Let’s look at the 6 top benefits of blogging to a small business.

1. Drives Traffic to your website

Every business wants prospective customers to visit its website. However, it is usually very hard to drive traffic without paying for it. For example, you can buy an email list or pay for the traffic to your site by the use of paid ads. In short, without enough money, you don’t easily get new visitors coming to your site. Small businesses have small budgets and for them to thrive, they have to come up with creative ways of attracting traffic. That’s where a blog comes in handy. A blog is probably the only section of your website that is likely to change more frequently.

Every new blog on your website becomes an extra indexed page which increases the chances of your website being visible to search engines. The more the visibility, the more the traffic to your website.

2. Boosts engagement with new and existing customers

A blog is a good way to strengthen your relationship with your customers. A blog becomes such an important tool that facilitates engagement with all your customers. By using quality and relevant content in a blog, a business is able to build trust and confidence in the consumers of their products. All that is needed is an active comments section where all customer inquiries are attended to promptly and to their satisfaction.

3. Converts traffic into leads

After a blog has generated traffic to the business website, it is the high time for you to make leads out of it. Since every blog post becomes a new indexed page, it means that new traffic is likely to come with new potential customers. This is achieved by adding a call-to-action to every new blog for purposes of generating new leads.

4. Increases your audience through sharing

Content sharing is one of the top benefits that comes with blogging. Whenever a customer shares a blog, their friends will see and probably get interested. Cumulatively, blog shares have the potential to drive massive traffic to your website. Imagine what happens when those friends keep sharing the blog over and over in more than one social media site. Your website will end up receiving exponential growth in traffic.

5. Helps to stamp authority as an industry leader

A quality blog addresses the concerns common to most customers. Every blog that leaves your customers’ questions properly addressed is a sure way of establishing yourself as a reputable business in your industry. Having sales and marketing professionals take charge of blogging is likely to bear fruits since they are more knowledgeable in coming up with content that will leave customers contented. This will make customers perceive you as an expert.

6. Driving long-term results

When you post a blog today, some of your customers will share it to their social media platforms. Sharing will be more on the first day and that means leads will be more too. As time goes, blog sharing activity declines and the same happens to the number of leads. This might sound bad but there is a bright side to it. Through this sharing, your website becomes more visible to search engines. This then means that for months and even years to come, your website will continue to get traffic and new leads just from that post you made in the past.

If you probably underestimated the power of blogging, you can now see just how powerful a tool it is when it comes to marketing your business. If you pay attention to content quality, business blogging has the potential to rival or replace some of the sophisticated marketing tools which could be quite expensive.

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