Should I Start a Blog for My Small Business?

by Randall Olson

If your company has an online presence, starting and maintaining a blog is a great way to grow your business by driving traffic to your website. Assuming that you have a good marketing-oriented website, increased traffic should result in new customers, increased sales, and a better bottom line.

When you want to grow your business, one of the best things you can do is start a blog that will appeal to members of your target audience. The blog shouldn't be all about your company. No one is going to visit your blog more than once if it doesn't provide information that is useful to them. Your blog content should focus on providing useful tips, advice, and information that will benefit the types of individuals that make up your primary customer base.

It's important to remember that blogs must be updated with valuable content on a regular basis. There are several ways to approach populating your blog with content. Some bloggers feel that all blog content must be unique. Others take advantage of free reprint articles, feeling that frequency of publication is more important than unique content. Many business owners whose goal is to attract customers and keep them coming back choose to use a combination of both types of blog content.

It's also important to let people know about your blog. Link it directly to the main page of your company's website so that it's easy for website visitors to find your blog. You also need to promote the blog to people who aren't finding their way to your website on their own. After all, you want to attract new visitors to your company's website.

There are many ways to promote your blog online, including social networking, using your blog's URL in your e-mail signature line, and making posts with links to your blog on other relevant blogs and forums. You can also promote your blog by adding it's website address to your business cards, advertising material, and other company marketing materials.

If you don't know where to begin with creating or marketing a blog, it's a good idea to enlist the services of qualified and reliable web development and internet marketing professionals to help you. Blogging can be an important component of the marketing strategy for any small business, so it's important that your blog look professional, convey the right image to prospective customers, and be developed using sound principles of Internet marketing.

About the Author:

Randall Olson is Director of Online and IT Services for Mobile Technical Institute & MTI Business Solutions http://www.mobiletechwebsite.com, where he provides information technology, web design and development, and Internet marketing services for a wide variety of clients. 

*This article can be reprinted provided the author bio and website link are included.