Creating a killer blog for your small business

With more and more small businesses starting up everyday, many of them are beginning to market themselves online by creating a website and a Facebook page. Facebook pages are a great way for small businesses to interact with customers and build a community up online. However a blog is even better.

What many small business websites are lacking is a blog. Having a small business blog can do wonders for your online presence and marketing strategy, however most small businesses still do not have a blog.  Here I will give you some advice on starting your own small business blog.

Why do i need a small business blog ?

Many people will be wondering this and there are more than just one answer.If you business has a website then it is probably not going to be a large website for just a small business. This means that it is going to appear in less search results and therefore going to get less traffic. Less traffic means a lower page rank. If you have a blog on your website then when a search is made for something you have blogged about then it just may appear in the search results. Therefore increasing your traffic and website authority. On the other hand doing this also increases your online presence. If people are regularly seeing your blog crop up in search results then they are to begin to trust your website and will want to find out more about your business.

Another reason to have a blog is to increase your online conversions. Having a blog can be a very successful way to market your product and gain a load of new customers without having to shell out a huge amount of money on advertising.

Find a platform to blog on

Once you have decided to start a blog then you need to find a platform to blog on. If you want to integrate your blog into your own self hosted website then in my opinion WordPress is going to be your best option. With WordPress you can easily set up your blog on your own server so you do not need a separate domain. As well as this if you are new to blogging then WordPress is very straight forward to use and there are a huge amount of tutorials available online. Another option is Blogger. A Blogger blog will not be hosted on your server and does not offer as much options as WordPress but is still a good alternative.

Online promotion

Once you have wrote some posts then you are going to need to promote your blog. You can do this by adding a link from the homepage of your website, however you also want to try to get people two have not visited your website before to come and visit your blog. Social media is probably going to be the best way to do this. First you need to set up a Facebook, Twitter and Google+ account. You may want to buy Twitter followers to really kick start your online social media campaign. Once you have done this you can then start promoting your blog posts. Twitter probably going to be where you have your most success as it can be very easy to get followers and if you are doing it right you can soon dominate Twitter. On the other hand Facebook is the most useful way to promote your blog online. The new Facebook timeline makes it easy for you to share and promote your content, whilst being easily able to interact with your readers and potential customers.

Networking

When running a blog or any online business actually, it is important to network with other bloggers and online businesses. By looking at other blogs in your niche then you can easily see how successful these other blogs are and work out what they are doing right and how to implement this into your blog. You will know you are doing something right when you start getting noticed by other people in your niche.

Final notes

As you should have realized by now blogging can be an extremely useful tool for small business. You can get many rewards from blogging and you are bound to increase your customers, as well as online presence. However what you do need to remember is that Rome was not built-in a day. A successful blog can take many months or even years to build up. Do not give up if you have not had much success after a month. instead look for what you are doing wrong and how you can fix this.