Blogging Benefits for Small Business Owners

Are there any benefits of blogging for small business owners? Sure thing, says Lyfe Marketing. In fact, “Many companies now practice a strategy where consumers come to them for information rather than them pushing sales via outbound strategies to spread awareness about their products”. Importantly, blogging helps reduce overall marketing spend by more than 60%, Lyfe points out, naming no fewer than 11 specific benefits of blogging as experienced first hand by business owners, in each case naming a specific well-known company that uses blogging to its advantage:

1. Trust: Show that you are an expert in your industry (Airbnb)
2. Value- add (Etsy Marketplace)
3. Higher ranking: Search Engine Optimization (Allstate and State Farm®)
4. Building email lists (beauty blogs)
5. Cultivate interest through demand generation (Apple)
6. Lead conversion (Slack)
7. Visibility (Tesla)
8. Influencer marketing (Home Depot)
9. Backlinks – other web pages link to your website (New York Times)
10. Feedback (Trip Advisor)
11. Stay ahead of competition (American Express)

“Publishing a business blog is an important part of any marketing strategy,” Marc Prosser, founder of Fit Small Business, writes in SCORE, “but many businesses launch one, not realizing that maintaining it is just as critical.” Prosser adds several items to Lyfe’s list of blogging benefits:

• Informing customers about the good work you do (85% of customers like companies that give back to the community)
• Promoting a positive employer brand so employees want to work there
• Helping business partners grow

As a longtime blog content writer and corporate blogging trainer, I often remind business owners of a very simple explanation by Corey Eridon of Hubspot of the reason blogging works: “Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website.  It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published…”.

As Shane McGeorge writes in CBO. “If you are interested in increasing your online exposure, while establishing yourself as an expert in your industry, then you will definitely want to take advantage of blogging as a marketing strategy,”