5 Ways Blogging Can Help Your Small Business

If you run a small business, you are probably into blogging already to help promote your business in an extremely cost-effective way. In this era of content marketing, blogging manages to help small businesses climb up the ladder of success more steadily at very minimal costs. For that reason, I believe you prefer online promotion over offline promotion because the former is cheaper and more cost-effective. Since many small businesses are almost always on a shoestring budget, investing time and resources in blogging has proved to be a better option than other marketing alternatives. The icing on the cake is that blogging can help to get a high ranking for your small business on search engines and that helps it to gain social media visibility. Here now are some very direct benefits.

01. Getting your business noticed. Getting your business noticed can cost you a fortune in advertising but blogging does it in an extremely cost-effective way. Blogging is an excellent way to get noticed by big industry players, investors and customers. People easily get skeptical about commercial advertising but with a blog, the expertise you put out there convinces people more easily and they take you seriously once they realize you are an expert in a subject matter which is highly beneficial to them.

02. Offering how-to guide. People always want to know how to get things done more easily which add real value to their lives. Blogging offers this guide succinctly. When you offer how-to guide in your blog, you easily draw readers’ attention through feedback and questions you receive. That helps to generate active interaction to your blog. That in turn helps to give your business the much-needed visibility.

03. Makes it easy to plan your content. Bloggers have realized that brands which excel in blogging are those that plan their content very meticulously. In fact, planning your content is a vital prerequisite for blogging. Blogging thus makes content planning fairly easy for brands.

04. Blog monetization. This appears to be the popular one. Everyone wants to make some side money in the course of running a blog alongside their small businesses. For example, Google adsense monetization among others offers ads from advertisers which they run on your blog as a publisher. You get paid per view, PPV and per click, PPC on such ads. Good business no doubt if your blog gets a lot of inbound traffic. For small businesses struggling with cash to stay afloat, blog monetization can be an alternative way for them to make money.

05. Promotes thought leadership. Online marketing experts argue that blogging is instrumental in establishing thought leadership for small businesses to get themselves firmly out there in a highly competitive market. Because people are a bit skeptical about direct business promotion/advertising, blogging appears to them as genuinely offering them help while subtly getting out the message about a brand. Because many customers don’t always take promotions too seriously, organic efforts, especially blogging, helps to establish thought leadership by filling in that gap adequately.