Yes, Small Business Owners Need to Blog

By Larry Alton

It’s pretty common knowledge that blogging is good for business—especially for small businesses that rely on grassroots marketing and word-of-mouth to build their brand. Now, there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing your content writing or assigning blogging responsibilities to individuals within your organization. However, if you own a small business and you’re not carrying at least some of the blog-writing burden on your shoulders, you’re losing out on a big marketing opportunity.

Blog Like a Pro

Neil Patel is one of the most respected names in Internet marketing and blogging. Forbes calls him one of the top 10 marketers, and President Obama named him a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30. When Patel says something works, you should probably listen. Hint: He thinks creating a blog is pretty great.

Patel’s been blogging for a decade, and now he makes a good living teaching others how to grow their business and website traffic. If you’re not familiar with his work—and even less familiar with writing a blog—check out his site and its many articles on how to write a good business blog.

Now let’s take a look at some of general benefits that small business owners can reap by making commitment to blogging their way to a better brand.

Blogging Gives Your Content Authority

When visitors read your company’s blog, one of the first things they’ll do is check out the author and read the byline. A blog post written by you, the owner of the company, carries a lot more weight and substance than an entry written by a marketing intern who’s just learning the ins and outs of your company.

Naturally, people view a business owner as the ultimate expert on that business. People will view what you write as highly authoritative and meaningful. While you obviously can’t spend all of your time blogging, writing a regular blog post each week is a great way to increase the reputation of your brand’s content.

Blogging Builds Your Personal Brand

While your primary focus is to grow your company in the present and position it well for the future, you might not always own that business. It pays to also think about your personal brand. You may need to rely on it to find another opportunity or to launch another successful company. Blogging is a key component of personal branding, and business owners should leverage it as such.

Blogging helps you build a portfolio of content, attract leads, pick up speaking opportunities, popularize your name in a niche, and network with others in your industry. If you don’t blog, you’re missing out on a prime (and free) opportunity to stand out among your competitors.

Blogging Drives More Traffic to Your Website

In a day and age when it’s becoming more and more expensive to drive traffic to a website, blogging is an organic lead generation tool that produces a tangible and direct return year-after-year.

“Blogging consistently has the capacity to increase the traffic to your company website, thereby increasing page views and hits as your business get more exposure,” digital marketer Jena Simonds explains.

Blogging Ensures Brand-Content Alignment

Nobody knows your brand better than you. While you can train a content writer on the basics of your company, ultimately that creates a disconnect. Sometimes this disconnect is small, while other times it’s quite noticeable. Regardless, you can enhance brand-content alignment by handling some of the writing personally. This will produce a more cohesive end product that does your brand justice.

Blogging Forces You to Think

“Sometimes people will ask me how I keep coming up with solid material to write,” says blogger Jeff Goins. “To be honest, the more you write, the more creative you become. As long as you’re writing on something your [sic] passionate about, you’ll keep taking your writing to a new level the more you do it.”

This is one of the more underrated benefits of blogging. The more you write, the more it forces you to think. As a result, you become more attuned to your own creativity. As a business owner, you understand the important role creativity plays in business, and blogging can help stimulate your ability to innovate new products and to develop new ideas.

Blogging Like You Mean It

Blogging is a powerful tool that every small business owner can and should use to grow their brand and increase their bottom line. The sooner you realize the benefits and start blogging regularly, the sooner you’ll start reaping those benefits.

Larry Alton is an independent business consultant specializing in social media trends, business, and entrepreneurship. Follow him on Twitter.