I am amazed at the blog-reluctance of many small businesses. I hear things like “I don’t have time to blog”, “blogging doesn’t make sense in my industry”, and sometimes even the dreaded “what the heck is a blog?”

The reality is if your company provides unique products or services, you should be blogging. (And if your company doesn’t, you should probably consider a career change.) Of course, the overall return on investment on a blog will vary from business to business. But there are 6 fundamental benefits to corporate blogging that should not be overlooked:

1 - Gain Visibility as a Thought Leader

Each thoughtful post on your blog is a public demonstration of your thought leadership, personal integrity, humour, and professional insights. You don’t have to refute one of Einstein’s theories to get respect. For example, a summary of recent trends in your industry, or a reaction to a recent news article can be extremely effective blog posts.

2 - Engage Customers in a Dialogue

If you blog using a solid blogging engine, readers will have the option to comment on each article. People who comment on your blog may be sales leads, or they may just challenge or support your views. Either way, comments beget comments, and you will soon be at the centre of an industry-relevant dialogue with customers and partners.

3 - Every Blog Article is an SEO Opportunity

The much-discussed “long tail” of search refers to highly specialized, low-traffic search terms that represent a significant amount of total searches. Translation: lots and lots of people are searching online for lots and lots of random things. You can’t realistically optimise your site for every long tail search term, but you can certainly write blog posts targeting niche keyword phrases that are likely to draw highly qualified prospects. For example, blog a reaction to the presentation of an industry expert from a recent industry conference.

You may not draw much natural search traffic, but there is a good chance your blog will rank well very soon for searches like “engineering + conference name + speaker name + city”, and those visitors may be highly interested in your reaction to the speech.

4 - Blogs Are Link Bait

Very few websites or bloggers will link to the “products and services” page on a corporate website. People don’t link to corporate advertisements. On the other hand, a good blog article is an industry-specific insight or a thoughtful critique. Blog articles garner links because they are interesting, informative, and not overly corporate or sales-focused. The benefit to you is that more links means better search engine rankings and more site traffic, which translates into more sales leads.

5 - Humanize Your Brand

Blogs offer an opportunity for a company to present its insightful, helpful, thoughtful side. Through a blog, prospects will get a sense of your company’s people, culture, and vision. Blogs are an opportunity to provide a less antiseptic view of your company that is more personal and less “corporate”. Blogs can humanize your brand.

6 - In Google, Fresher Content = Better Website

Google will periodically crawl websites looking for new and updated content. In general, it is better to have Google crawl your site as often as possible. Sites that get crawled more often have more frequent updates and more authority. Blogging consistently ensures there will be fresh content on your site.

You may also interested in:

1. How to Start and Run a Successful Blog for Your Business
2. What is Stopping You from Starting a Blog?
3. 10 Link Building Tactics to Improve Blog Search Engine Rankings

There are a number of places to embark on your social media journey, but possibly one of the best bang for buck tools is a company blog. A blog by definition is a ‘web log’ or a self-published journal-style post on your website. Blogs are generally designed to display the most recent items at the top of a page, and written in a conversational, personal style, giving the author an authentic voice online. Blogs can offer readers the opportunity to comment on, and link to items.

Because blog items can be made available from the site in a stream of content - known as an RSS feed - you can subscribe to them and read them through a newsreader or aggregator. That means you don't have to visit a blog site to read it - you can pull the content to your desktop or a single website aggregator. Blogs are easy to set up, and update.

A blog is the best way for a company to reach out and build a community with customer, clients, and users. A blog allows the company to have a transparent platform wherein the customer is able to interact with the company, offer feedback, and learn more about the company culture.

It is crucially important to design and develop the blog for your audience and then optimise it for search engines and for social media. A well-written, value-driven blog post is essential in driving traffic, establishing authority, and adding value to the community. The blog is not a press release page; instead, it should target a highly relevant audience, teaching them new things about the Client’s industry, reviewing products, or just displaying the Client’s fun company culture.

Blogs can be incorporated as part of your company website or very easily established and branded under online publishing resources such as WordPress or Blogger.

To write a successful blog, there are a few simple rules to follow.

Be Addictive. One of the key aspects of any successful blog is the ability to create content that keeps drawing people back to your blog.

Be regular and consistent with when you publish. We all get brain block and are time poor, so build up a reserve of blogs, or at least blog topics.

Less is more. Clear and concise writing captures a larger audience. The blog does not have to read the length of War and Peace. Just remember, you might be time-poor in writing the blog, but the reader is just as time-poor when finding time to read it.

Offer Insight. Just because someone else has written about it does not mean you should not write about it too, because your post may offer information or insights that the reader has not encountered before.

Turn it on. Try and invoke a response from the reader, give them that light bulb moment that causes them to look at the world differently… at least for that day.

And finally, a blog is never, ever an overt sales advertisement for your product. We are not taking a microphone and touting our wares. Instead, think of a blog as thought leadership. Position yourself as the expert in your field, not a cheap salesperson with a microphone.

You may also interested in:

1. What is Stopping You from Starting a Blog?
2. 10 Link Building Tactics to Improve Blog Search Engine Rankings
3. 6 Reasons Every Small Business Should Be Blogging