Small Businesses – Come On, Get A Blog Already
Posted by Fran Jeanes in Web Design Feb 28th, 2010 | 2 responses
Small businesses need to blog. It’s true. I tried to squeeze the reasons why into a neat sounding five or ten but I ended up with twelve. I’m sure there are even more reasons but let’s take a look at the twelve – why I think blogs are so important for small businesses to use:
1. Blogs are a break from the sales-speak that is the norm on a business website. They are a two way conversation, or at least can be, between a small business and its customers. This type of web format can help build relationships in a way that a regular website never can.
2. Blogs are the perfect platform for being less formal, more chatty, more approachable, and undoubtedly more ‘human’ in content. People like that, so people like blogs and like to follow them.
3. Not only are blogs a way for companies to reach out to their customers, they can be used to show different sides to a business, for example stories behind why a company has decided to support a certain charity. Blogs can be about anything so get creative!
4. With blogging platforms being easy to use they make editing a breeze – it’s painless for staff to learn how to update and maintain a site without needing to wait for a web designer to slot updates into their schedule.
5. The search engines love ‘em. Wordpress, especially, is loved by the search engines because the code is well written, but they also ‘know’ that blogs, by their very nature, are updated regularly – so they come back frequently and index them. That’s good for a small business that wants to do better on Search Engine Results Pages [SERPs.]
6. Blogs won’t break the bank [the good ones are all open source and free] – if you want custom web design to make your Wordpress templated site unique then you pay for that, but not the software that runs the blog.
7. They are easy to backup – plugins will backup your all important database files automatically as often as you want. It’s a set it and forget it option that can save you from a hacking disaster.
8. Blogs have a built-in RSS feed that can be used by other sites so your content can be spread far and wide over the Internet with no extra work involved on your part. And that works the other way too – your business site can be updated with content found on other sites.
9. The content is separate from the design. This means the data is always displayed on the site but with a single click the look of the site can change.
10. There are so many templates available, or you can get a custom template designed, that it’s easy to have your blog look just how you want it to, easily.
11. Blogs can get listed on a lot of blog directories – that’s more incoming links to make your site go up in the SERPs.
12. With so many plugins a blog can be customized to do so many things, like ecommerce as well as be automagically filled with content.
And lastly, [OK, so this is the bonus thirteenth reason!] you can use a blog for your whole site – well the blogging platform that is. For example, this website is all being run on Wordpress but the static business informational pages are setup to look different to the blog section, but Wordpress is running them both: a nice simple, headache free solution – the way maintaining a website should be.
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2 Responses to “Small Businesses – Come On, Get A Blog Already”
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Nice post. I couldn’t agree more and can’t stress enough that content drives design. If you have plenty to say about how great your business is – get out there and share it with your potential customers. Tell them why what you do can make their life better. Don’t be shy!
Hey Adam! Thanks for stopping by.
Like you said, using a blog to spread the word about how a product or service can make potential customers’ lives easier is a great reason to get blogging. It’s so much easier to convey that information in a more informal setting and at the same time really gain visitor trust, as well as position a business as the authority/go to in their market.