When it comes to a small business, your business, it's never to early to start blogging. Get started from day 1 and you will be rewarded eventually. I've actually had numerous clients tell me something along the lines of "I'll start blogging in a few months after we get settled in". This is one of the worst things you can do because you're just delaying your online success. Even if you're not ready for sales, you can still be blogging and increasing your subscribers as well as your search engine rankings. Once you are ready for sales, it will be like opening the flood gates of people who have been waiting to buy from you.
There are numerous reasons you should be blogging in order to help your business, but here I will cover the top 8.
1. Obtaining customer responses before you dive all in
When blogging, you will want to monitor what your potential clients are saying on every post. If the comments are positive and have potential for sales, keep it up! If the comments are negative and will never help, rethink what you're posting and tweak your plan of attack.
2. Blogging will help your SERP rankings
When you're consistently adding high quality content to your blog, the search engines will take notice. After a while, you will notice that the search engines have started to boost you within their rankings and this means you will be gaining some free traffic from the search results within Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
The more you're posting, the more likely you will hit page 1 for your keywords and get a decent amount of traffic for a long period of time. Do this dozens of times and you will have a pretty good traffic flow and ROI.
3. Develop your own writing voice
No one wants to get to a website and see that everything is a sales pitch. You'll want to write for the people, not to pitch to the people, in order to increase your trust among them. You can have adverts on your pages, but your content should never really be pitchy unless it's on an obvious sales page. Keep your blog pitch free and your visitors will love you a bit more for it.
4. Blogging can bring in investors
When blogging, you're getting the word out about the topic you're covering as well as getting your website noticed. Many times I've heard of someone covering a topic and it resulted in a few investors coming in and wanting to partner up. Now, this might not be for everyone, but you never know what big fish you might hook when blogging
5. Write like a leader and be seen as one
Many small online businesses will fall short on this one because they don't always sound like the authority within their niche when blogging. When someone is looking for a job, they don't want to choose the 10th best option, they want the best of the best, and you'll want to portray that if you're wanting to be the best in your niche. Now you don't have to hire anyone, you just need to be seen as a leader and make people want to work for you
6. You can start building your subscribers early on
Now I briefly covered this in the intro, but it's worth talking about again. Start building up your own hype and collecting emails and leads in order to market to later on. Remember, you're building a brand and you will always want to be working with email marketing, so collect emails from the beginning.
Doing this will increase your leads, sales, and even get you some speaking opportunities that will result in higher paying clients.
7. Blogging is the first step towards being a social media pro
Each and every blog post you do, unless you're doing 20 a day, needs to be shared on your social media accounts. You can share to the big ones like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for the biggest affect, but you can always branch out and test other waters.
8. You'll get seen and possibly attract investors
By focusing on the top 8 things I just covered, you will be able to push your startup even further towards success in a shorter amount of time. Never delay you blogging, you'll just be hurting yourself in the long run and delaying everything. Be yourself and don't pitch on your blog, use it for informational purposes and your viewers will like you more for it.
