Real Benefits of Blogging for Small Business

 The bottom line is always exposure, business exposure. That’s what every blog does for a business. Thus blogging has become one of the most desired and effective forms of marketing strategy, which provides ample scopes for online exposure of any small business. It is one of the most effective ways to promote your small business because it helps small businesses to easily develop their brand awareness among blog readers. This comes about by regularly providing them with relevant and quality content through blogs. In terms of costs, blogging is one of the cheapest ways of driving targeted visitors towards any small business websites resulting in the much needed inbound marketing which small businesses really need to boost sales conversions.


 
Here are more specific benefits of blogging. 
 
Helps Business Reputation

Blogging is a highly innovative way to show your business to your audience. By attracting their attention, you then build trust by providing them regular, relevant, unique and high quality content through your blog posts. If the informative content you provide helps to adequately address customer needs and solves problems for them, you easily gain reputation for your small business. Your customers will just keep coming back.

Easy Connection with Your Brand

When customers get to like what you are putting out there through your blog, they connect. What the blog does is to provide a very unique way of showcasing your small business before your audience.  When people become aware of your brand, if they like it and find it suitable to meet their requirements and needs, they cement the link to become your permanent customers. That’s a great benefit to the business.

Helps to Boost SEO

When your blog becomes popular with search engines, it is easy for it to attain SEO, Search Engine Optimization on the search engines. SEO sends the content high up in the rankings of search engines which helps the blog to get good organic traffic. With fresh content added regularly, your blog can easily beat its competitors to it in search engines results pages. That helps to provide the support for improving your website rankings and driving in targeted traffic.

Enhances Sharing

Easy sharing somehow readily helps blog popularity. With easy sharing of your blog, your business achieves reputation and credibility as a result. A blog is readily one of the easiest ways to create opportunities for sharing vital information with others. The easier it is to share this information, the more the popularity of the business. Most blogs can now be shared easily with free Internet marketing tools like emails, social media networks and the likes. All these help to build quick popularity and reputation.

Building Important Relationships and Engagements
 
Every business is all about building and maintaining relationships. Blogging allows for connecting with people in many and varied ways. With easy two-way communication, you can engage your blog readers in conversation as a way of building trust. Most blogs allow blog readers to make comments and ask questions at the end of every post. With that, you get good feedback on your ideas which you can respond to as a way of building great and beneficial relationships. By promptly responding to their comments and feedback, you can develop a good rapport with them. That allows you to get a credible insight into their needs, concerns and choices. A great business relationship is thus enhanced.


 

Benefits of Guest Blogging

For the sake of my small business, I blog. Maybe, you blog too for same reasons. These days, nearly everyone who is doing business online blogs. Many people blog for one main reason, business exposure. Everyone else blogs for business exposure and customer attraction. Business exposure is what everyone blogs for. Besides updating your small business blog with fresh content that resonates with your website visitors, contributing articles to other blogs can further enhance your brand’s image. That is what is known as guest blogging. It attracts some good measure of exposure when properly done. Guest blogging offers several benefits which include:

– Building your reputation as an expert in your chosen field.
– Introducing you to industry leaders and influencers in your business field.
– Helping you increase the social media following of your business.
– Increasing the exposure of your brand.
– Providing the opportunity to link back to your business website.
– Helping your Search Engine ranking for SEO benefits.


 

7 Ways to Generate More Exposure on LinkedIn

As you may already be aware of, LinkedIn has become increasingly popular as the choice platform for business and professional persons to market themselves. Now everyone who wants to be taken seriously in business and the professions is getting out there to showcase themselves. Here is how you use the full potentials of the platform for maximum benefits.

01. Increase Your Connections.  Even though you may not accept all connection requests coming your way, more connections directly means more pairs of eyes seeing what you are offering. That is to say, more connections mean more people getting notifications every time you publish something on LinkedIn platform. With the easy information sharing buttons provided, you can directly expand your network exponentially by way of second-degree and third-degree connections or even more. As they say in this business, “The more the merrier.”

02. Engage with Your Connections’ Posts and Milestones. Always bear in mind that all LinkedIn users are real people with feelings and emotions. For that reason, any time you get a notification that one of your connections is having a work anniversary, birthday, and marriage anniversary or has got a new job; don’t fail to send a personalized congratulatory message no matter how busy you are. 

03. Send Direct Messages with Special Offers. Explore credible and acceptable ways to engage your contacts without having to embark on spamming. As human beings, our emotions and temperaments vary from person to person. So, you can’t be too careful in deciding which messages are suitable to send to other persons on the platform if you want them to remain friends with you.

04. Republish Your Existing Content. I assume you have a blog because nearly everyone out there online has one these days. If you have a blog, republishing your content onto LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform is one of the easiest ways to notify your network about what is trending in your end. Generating more awareness is what gets people interested in your blog content. The more you get that before them, the better exposure you get.

05. Ask a Question with Every New Contact Request. If you are on LinkedIn, no doubt you get connection requests from time to time. It is advisable that when someone sends you a connection request, instead of just accepting it, you can grab the opportunity to reach out to them to find out what piqued their interest in your work or your profile. That is one way to get personal and it makes others to get more interested in you as well.

06. Choose and Comment on Popular Posts. The more you comment on popular posts, the more such posts “carry you along” in their popularity. Google and other Search Engines do index popular posts and your comments benefit as well. That gives you real and meaningful exposure if you ask me.

07. Encourage Conversations on LinkedIn Instead of regular Email. Every Social Media platform tends to have its own unique language and culture. LinkedIn is not any different. You may consider regular email a lot easier to handle all of your communication through but keeping it within the LinkedIn platform makes for easier bonding and camaraderie. That helps to build trust and better exposure on the platform.