7 Reasons Why Small Business Owners Should Blog.

 This month we’re going to be looking at blogs and how having one can help your business. I think that in the past I would have said that Blogs aren’t for everyone and there will always be some people who aren’t interested in writing them but I have come up with 7 reasons why small business owners should blog to help their business.

 Now before I start telling you about them I will admit I haven’t been great over the years at keeping my blog up to date. In my defence in my mind was, I am a web designer – my job is to create sites to help other people’s businesses. So if I wasn’t creating sites or running around after the kids, it didn’t leave a lot of spare time. Maybe this sounds familiar to you? It was my excuse, but there is part of me that wishes I’d kept it up. Also with social media platforms trying to make it harder and harder for you to get “free” or unpaid posts out to your fans, I decided that it was important to update my site, including my blog, so here we are.

 So what is a blog?

 A blog is whatever you want or need it to be. It can be an online diary about what you’ve been working on, it can be a collection of articles related to your business, it can promote your business and attract new customers or they can add value to your company as a resource for users.

 Organise your thoughts – 

 writing blogs can help you to organise your thoughts. You need to make these thoughts organised so you can pass them on to your reader.

 You have to plan, what you’re going to write about, find images. The act of writing can help you focus or you might even have to do additional reading about the topic. 

 Linking topics together and linking back to old posts.

Organise your thoughts - reason to blog - Pippas Web

An opportunity to discuss/show off your latest project –

 If you are a service, for example, an oven cleaner you may post about challenging or unusual things that happen to you when you cleaning or a driving instructor you may choose to blog to tell others about a new student pass. When I first started I did blog posts about clients sites when they went live. This is great content but as with everything you have to mix it up. If you only post this student passed Yes people get to see lots of passes but doesn’t add any information.

Show off your latest project - reason to blog - Pippas Web

 Blogs don’t have to be too long – you can do short posts from about 300 words (I would recommend more but this is a minimum) so whatever you post about you make sure you write about it. Even if it includes a photo or video – always write a description (if someone is flicking through with no sound on they may not want to watch the video so tell them what is being discussed in the video

Give you content to post about on social media-

 Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. – if you’re like me your always trying to think of new things to post. If you’ve written a blog, make sure you share it out on your page and to any relevant groups (providing it’s with the groups own regulations). Tell your follower what that blog is about – entice with good headlines and give them a link so that can read more (remember on Instagram direct links won’t work so maybe post the link in your bio rather than relying on people trying to copy and paste the text into links.

Content to post on social media- reason to blog - Pippas Web

 Create resources for clients existing or future –

If you make products that people buy you could do how to care for your …… blog posts or posts about the signs to look out for when someone is in shock if you run a first aid company. Give your customers access to more info to help them make the most of your product or the service you’ve provided

Create resources for clients - reason to blog - Pippas Web

Become an authority 

 An authority blog or an authority site is one of the main places people go to for information on a particular niche or topic… By providing useful information and demonstrating your knowledge and being in front of potential customers/clients. You want to become THE GOTO source for info. 

Become and authority- reason to blog - Pippas Web

Google Searches

Google’s Bert and SEO This October Google has released Google says this is a big Algorithm update which is supposed to help improve Google learn and improve the results for Longer search queries.

 In the early days on Google, you would enter one or two words to find what you were looking. Then Google focused on locations and making near me and option. But now with mobiles, voice search and the like the words we choose are more sentence based on our natural speech patterns – random search terms like for example “can I get welly boots in town?”.

Help with SEO - reason to blog - Pippas Web

 This latest algorithm update Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or as Google calls it–BERT, for short. Helps Google to understand this seemingly random questions. 

 While you can’t optimise for everything that google user might want to know, having more content on your site in the form of the blog means you can cover more keyword phrases around your business niche. Carrying out SEO on and off the site/blog is still important for example getting links to your blog are a little like vote for your blog – the more votes the more Google thinks of your site. However, of course not all Votes are equal and Google respects certain types of links more than others. But generally speaking, something that drives traffic onto your site can only be a good thing.

 Make you money

 As well as drawing in potential new customers you can also be earning money from your blog. This is called Monetising your blog. You can do this in different ways, but in order for it to be effective, you do need to be getting a lot of traffic to your blog.

Monetising your blog - reason to blog - Pippas Web

 Ways to monetise your blog

  • Affiliate marketing – this is where you promote products or services in return for a percentage of each sale.
  • Advertising sell advertising space on your blog – whether you do it yourself usually dealing with one company at a time or sign up to a company like Google AdSense which takes care of the behind the scenes you just need to add the code on your site. 
  • Sell your – Ebooks, courses, products, coaching services.

 Did you know that your blog doesn’t even have to be on your website to benefit your business?

 Perhaps you don’t want to or can’t add a blog onto your existing site for any reason you could consider using wordpress.com or blogger.com. If you want to use this then make sure you link back to your main site either in the writers’ profile or within the post itself.

 If you already have a blog then leave me a comment and add a link to your latest post. (There you go a link for your site, as a thank you for leaving me a comment.)

 If your small business doesn’t yet have a blog and you want help setting it up then contact me via the site / Facebook or Instagram.

Avatar for Pippa Haines Pippas Web

I am Pippa and I have run Pippas Web - web design for small businesses for 13 years. I help small business owners find their bit of cyberspace. I provide the technical know-how, so they can get back to running their business. If you like what I write in my blogs, you can sign up to my newsletter for more tips straight to your door. All list members get a copy of "How to get your business seen online in 2021".

2 thoughts on “7 Reasons Why Small Business Owners Should Blog.”

  1. I imagine that Google would be working towards getting the voice recognition as close as possible to written search keywords, so ensuring there’s plenty of content for each linked keyword to your company on the site.

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