12 Reasons Why You Should Blog about Your Business

If you will search something on Google, its search engine will provide you a list of links to contents and information that match your search query. If you will observe those links, most of them are blogs. Quality blogs are rich in information. That is why quality and useful blogs are indexed deeply by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Now, if you turn your monitor to social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter, you will also see a lot of links from blogs on your friends’ status updates. Some of them go even viral that gain an instant popularity online. As you will see, blogs possess a power that business owners in any sizes can use to fuel their marketing campaigns. If offline marketing can encourage the word-of-mouth from customers, blogging can generate the word-of-links from people who have access on the Internet. Thus, if you’re a businessman or an entrepreneur who wants to optimize business success, you should consider blogging about your company or enterprise. Here are 12 reasons why you should blog about your business now.

 

1. It is cost-effective

Anyone can start a blog. One can even start a blog without spending a dime through Blogger.com or WordPress.com. But since you will be blogging for your business, I recommend that you register your own domain name to show that you are taking blogging as a serious business. This will give you an Internet address like www.YourName.com instead of www.Your Name.blogspot.com, which the earlier will give you a more customized and unique identity online. Registration for a dotCOM domain will only cost you about $10 per year. Aside from the cost of your domain, you will also spend money for monthly web hosting. Web hosting fee for a small business blog can require you to spend around $10-$20 every month. You can get free WordPress themes, but you can also choose to buy premium elegant themes for only $39 here. So you will invest a one time fee of $39 for a premium theme and an average of $16 per month for your domain and web hosting. It’s obviously a great investment considering the big return.

 

2. It can be a powerful marketing weapon

The information produced and shared by bloggers on their blogs can rule out the search engines (i.e., Google, Yahoo and Bing) through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and the social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc.) through social media marketing. Google alone attracts hundreds of millions of searchers everyday, if you have a blog which pages are ranked higher in the search results, you are on your way to receive targeted visitors referred by the search engine giant. For example, if you are running a hotel and restaurant business, you can start a blog about hotels, restaurants, travel and tourism within your place. If you blog posts are search engine optimized and you ranked good on specific search keywords that are related to your business, you will be driving a lot of interested visitors to your blog. You can also create viral contents on your blog that will become popular and widely shared on social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Thus, your blog and your blog posts will become your primary voices online.

 

3. It attracts more customers

You can blog by writing articles, posting images, making videos, recording podcasts and creating infographics about your business. If you can provide quality, solutions and usefulness on your blog posts, you will attract a wide audience of people, as well as potential customers. The key to attracting loyal readers is to publish contents that are reader-oriented rather than profit oriented. In other words, you should blog or write for them and not for yourself. If your blog will be a bunch of press releases or a database of articles, photos and videos on how you enjoy your corporate travel, company party and your new cars, then I don’t see it attracting the interests of many people who seek information on the Internet to obtain answers and solutions to their problems. You can publish your new products or inform people about the recent changes and updates in your company. However, you should focus on providing refreshing and enlightening information on your blog. In our example in #2, you can blog about helpful tips on taking a vacation and tips on saving money on travel and accommodation. You can also publish beautiful photos about your town or province or make videos that can guide travelers, tourists and backpackers.

 

4. Your competitors might be using it now against you

Another big reason why you should be blogging about your business is the fact that your business competitors are already blogging about their own businesses at this moment. If you don’t want to be left behind, then you should start blogging now. Giving your business an online presence is already a must nowadays. You will not like it when your company doesn’t exist on the Internet. People are already spending most of their time on the Internet these days.

 

5. It builds up your brand

If you have already built your brand offline, then it’s now time to level up and build your brand online. Your blog will carry your business identity online, with your company name, logo, slogan or tagline, mission and your vision. The Internet world is a big market and ignoring it might produce significant disadvantages on your side. In this competitive world of business, we should maximize every opportunity we can ethically add to our advantage. In our example of doing hotel business, people may know about your hotel name or hotel service, but they might not know about the people behind it. If you will start blogging about your business and the persons behind it, people will know more than just your building. They will know deeper about your business, about your people, and it will increase their trust on you. Don’t you know that loving starts from knowing?

 

6. It manages your online reputation

Bad critiques and attackers are inevitable in this world, especially when your company or brand is already gaining popularity. Good companies may suffer social media attacks that can destroy their reputation. For example, some people will deliberately write lies about your products or services just to degrade your brand. They can blog about it to be indexed on search engines and they can also spread it on Facebook. If you have a blog and you have a strong online presence, you can counter these attacks and defend your brand online by blogging and sharing information to destroy a hoax and to clean your business presence online. On Facebook alone, it’s easy to spread a lie, especially if the attacker have many fake accounts and have collected many friends.

 

7. It converts more profit

Firstly, blogging is a low cost form of marketing or advertising. Thus, when you spend less, you earn more, considering revenue is constant or increasing. Secondly, blogging helps businesses targets the right customers, that is, the loyal customers. Your blog’s readers whom you constantly satisfy and help through your blog contents may become your loyal followers, as well as your loyal customers. Thirdly, because of your extended popularity and exposure online, aside from the quality of customers, you may also achieve the quantity of customers. In other words, you will be spending less expense, you will be earning quality customers, and you will be attracting an increased quantity of customers. Consequently, your profit will rise, not to mention that you can also earn other income from your blog by placing some decent and useful advertisements that are relevant from your business.

 

8. It promotes good customer relations

A blog has a commenting system that can encourage your visitors to talk. It can also serve as your company’s online discussion system for accommodating potential and existing customers’ questions, suggestions and other queries. Your business blog can actually become your extra customer service tha will guide your customers to do business with more convenience and customer care. And since a blog is supposed to publish a daily or regular blog post, you will be providing constant touch or communication with your customers and followers, thereby creating deeper and lasting relationship with them. You can also extend your blog’s reach by offering free newsletters through your visitors email subscriptions or by creating a Facebook page for your business blog to communicate with your followers on Facebook.

 

9. It gives you opportunity to educate the world

Teaching is one of the best and most fulfilling professions in the existence. Seeing people’s lives transform for good and seeing them happy is such a great fulfillment. Through blogging, you can have the opportunity to face a wider audience to share your knowledge, wisdom and everything that you find which can change people’s lives. Educating your targeted customers also helps you in finding loyal customers who also become your friends. So if you’re in a hotel business, you can educate the world about tourism, geography, food, culture, the life’s adventure and other interesting topics.

 

10. It supports your cause

Blogging is also a great way to support your cause or your social responsibility. If your hotel business is supporting and protecting our environment, you can always write and publish about protecting our planet. If you don’t have a cause right now, you better dig and find one – it’s our social responsibility, and every businessman or entrepreneur must be socially responsible. Furthermore, seeing a company that is sincere in promoting its social responsibility is admiring and inspiring not only to customers, but also to the public.

 

11. It brings you to a new world and to new friends

If you blog, you will become a blogger, and the bloghosphere is a world that is full of nice bloggers. Bloggers’ groups are all over the country and in the world. They are found on Facebook and other online places. This means that when you become a blogger, you will meet other bloggers who will help you and who will become your online buddies. The more world and more friends you will have, the more your brand will extend. Remember that bloggers have the power to influence the search engines and the social media. So if you will become a good friend of bloggers, they will become a good help to your business. On my Facebook account, I think I have a hundred friends who are bloggers – and they are a big help to me.

 

12. It enhances your creativity and talent

Blogging is fun and exciting. It also sharpens your talents in writing, photography, search engine optimization, social media marketing and other skills involved in blogging. You don’t actually need to start as a problogger. Remember that every expert has started as a newbie. Though I don’t consider myself a problogger now, I still remember when I started blogging 5 years ago, my grammar is ugly and my write-ups are hard to understand. But now, at least it improves a little bit through constant practice and learning different writing styles from various writers and bloggers. Blogging also taught me how to do Internet marketing, such as SEO, viral marketing and social media promotion. It’s really fun to do blogging. So if you want to add some fun to your business, start blogging about your business now.

I’m just here to share to you my acquired knowledge and experience when it comes to good blogging. So feel free to share your thoughts and comment below.