How to Market a Small Business with a Blog

"Blogging may be the most cost effective method of marketing a small business available. So then why don’t more business owners make more effective use of their blogs?"

(Via SmallBizTrends.com)

This is a great question. I think the main reason is it seems time consuming (probably because it is!).

Blogging for small businesses is useful in two ways.

1) It's a way to demonstrate your expertise.

When you're speaking with a prospective client, you can send them to your blog to prove you know what you're talking about.

I've been on many sales conversations that were initiated by a potential client where they had read multiple blog posts and watched multiple videos on my blogs before we ever spoke by phone.

It helps to prove your company is the real deal and actually knows its stuff.

2) It's a way to get leads

When you blog a little, it doesn't actually help get more traffic to your website. But if you are consistent in blogging regularly, the cumulative effect is quite noticeable in terms of getting new business.

There are three tricks to this.

First you need to blog about topics people are searching for on google. Notice the title of this blog post is one that is designed to match what someone would enter into a google search box.

This is not an accident.

Second, your content needs to be good. It needs to be "bookmark-able" as in wow, this blog post was so useful, I actually need to book mark it so I can reference it later — it was THAT good.

That's the goal.

Third, keep it up. By my ball park estimate, it takes about 50 really good blog posts to get enough critical mass to get noticed. So blog 2 times a week for 6 months, and you hit that level.

At that point, your blog will start to get noticed in the search engines and by other bloggers who will link to your blog posts. Links are THE currency in the blogging world. It's a "vote" from other website owners that your content is GOOD.

Google's search algorithms tallies up these "votes" (aka links) and ranks you accordingly.

Most people give up before then.

There are ways to speed up this process, but publishing good content and enough of it is the foundation.