Top 10 Reasons You Should Be Blogging

1. Content

Blogging for business adds new content—a big part of search engine optimization—and is a part of social media, so you’re killing two (or more!) birds with one stone. By creating the blog on your company URL (e.g., Yoursite.com/blog), each post you create adds a new page of content to the main website structure.

2. Video marketing

Each post can include a video that is both on your business blog page itself and on YouTube. This connects you directly to a top social media site and takes advantage of the ever-so-hot trend of online video.

3. Niche markets

There are millions of blogs, and hence many niche directories in which you can list your business blog. This provides new links to your site and more visibility.

4. Public relations

Business blogs are PR-friendly! For example, you can announce that you’re business blogging with a press release or you can use your blog as a vehicle for press releases. Google thinks highly of websites that appear in the news—don’t you?

5. Community interaction

Your business blog can become a source of user-generated content when people add their comments to your posts. More people commenting on your blog means more visitors are engaged in your site, and engagement is a key website value factor (and a key marketing metric to track in general). User engagement is great for improving your Google rankings, too.

Google supposedly has a patent on a system for evaluating the personas that comment on your blogs and their social profiles. Some who comment might want to hide their real names, sometimes for legitimate reasons like political oppression or other privacy concerns, but others do it to game the system and artificially inflate rankings. This will be a problem and potential ranking factor for a while to come, so keep in mind that it is all being watched in a very sophisticated way. The ideal is to attract fans and influencers who not only read your blog but engage with it through comments, sign-ups, likes, and shares.

6. Followers

When people really get into your blog, they can become followers by signing up for your content to be delivered directly to them via RSS feeds or by email. Again, Google may track this and the more of it you have, the better, as this level of engagement is a serious vote of confidence in you that is hard to “fake” or “game.”

7. Brand buzz

Google picks up on the activity and buzz around your brand (mostly at this time through the corresponding backlinks they help create) and then trusts you more and ranks you better, so you can integrate your business blog with Facebook and other social media to spread your message. Start a LinkedIn group or G+ community around your blog’s topic, make sure you’re tweeting your blog posts, and keep the conversation going!

8. Viral content

If your content is really cool or unique, you may be able to leverage sites like Digg or Reddit to drive tens of thousands of visitors to your site within a short period of time. More eyeballs mean potentially more sales, and more visitors and links mean better search engine ranking!

9. Link juice

Links from other sites to your cool or interesting blog content are worth their weight in SEO gold.

10. Brand & reach

Branding via a blog is easier and less expensive than TV ads, radio ads, newspaper ads, and listings in the phone book. You can potentially reach more people with a business blog than you can with traditional forms of advertising if you take the time to make your blog amazing.

Photo credit: manoftaste.de / Foter / CC BY