Is Blogging Right For Your Small Business?

Our host today is Anton Bell. If you're interested in getting in front of the readers of Site Sketch 101, check out our guest posting invitation here.

Back in the late 1990s, a new phenomenon was taking the world wide web by storm: “weblogging”. In those early days, weblogs, or “blogs” for short, mainly functioned as personal journals. Then over the early 2000s, blogs took off and became as varied and disparate as the readers it served on the internet.

Now the form is almost unrecognizable from its humble origins: everybody from large mega corporations to government representatives to 12-year-old boys have blogs of their own.

The blogging industry has seen an enormous explosion of “niche” blogging, as well as commercial blogging, promotional blogging and infotainment blogging, to name but a few of the micro-niches that have emerged. Some blogs have readerships numbering in hundreds of thousands, while some others thrive in obscurity as personal journals.

But as a small business owner, the most important question for you to consider is whether YOU need to start blogging, and whether blogging can help your business flourish.

The main draw of the blog is its ease of publication. You can potentially reach millions of readers at the single – often FREE! – click of a button. By doing something as simple as sharing your thoughts about your industry or your area of expertise on the internet on a regular basis, you could end up creating a real, tightly networked community of commenters and discussions who gather together at your blog as if it were a Parisian café circa 1850, having intelligent conversation pertinent to your interests and maybe even your product.

This is an exciting, affordable way to generate enormous publicity. It’s one of the reasons why blogging is so popularly being used to attract customers by so many millions of businesses.

So how does one get started? First, the basics.

A blogger is someone who writes content, or articles, for a blog. The “Blogosphere” is the community of blogs and bloggers and repliers who all come together to create a network based on the act of blogging.

The main difference between a blog and a website is the frequency with which a blog is updated. Websites tend to be static; the content on them tends to be updated only a few times every year. Nevertheless, a blog is often updated every single day with fresh content, sometimes even several times a day.

Blogs also allow much more direct user interaction. Whereas a website may have a feedback form somewhere at the back of the site, every blog post has its own comment thread, which allows readers and visitors to your page to share their thoughts about your product, creating chatter that is highly valuable to you as a marketing tool.

A blog that is frequently updated with fresh and relevant content, which manages to draw regular visitors and frequent comments, is a valuable part of your business’s marketing strategy. The size of your company does not matter here. The size of your bottom-line does not matter either. All that matters is that your content is enticing enough to draw regular readers.

A note of caution at this point: blogs that are blatantly promotional, where the entries do little other than serve as advertisements for your product, rarely thrive and draw few readers. A blog must be useful to its readers in order for it to be effective.

While this might take a little time and effort, the payoff potential is huge. Try blogging for your business today.