Blogging Hands
Small and Medium business owners, have you ever wonder what a blog can do to your business?
Weblog or blog (as it is commonly known) is a website maintained by individuals or even companies nowadays. A blog is usually theme based consisting of post ranging from personal profiles, to short stories, to gaming, technology, movies, hobbies, science, sports, and even jokes. Those posts in turn attract organic traffic from the search engine. Indirectly it becomes a form of advertising for things the blogger wants to share about. Creating and maintaining of some small scale website or even blog can be free if it’s hosted on say blogspot or even wordpress.com platform.
Some bloggers are utilizing the sites to pull in advertising money, be it from Google AdSense or other sources. However, a blog base website holds far more potential and importance for a business owner, especially the small business owners where advertising dollars are limited. Blog based website becomes a useful and effective way in gaining the much needed exposure for the small business owners. See it as a word of mouth on the internet. It puts them on a level playfield with bigger companies if their blog is setup in a manner that is SEO optimized.
Small business owners should make full use of such a channel to their advantage. The purchasing habits of buyers had change.
A lot of people started their product information search from the internet. I personally had search on companies which I know for information, sad to say I had found so many small businesses to even medium size companies neglecting that. They are either non-existence or had their website set up in a manner that cannot be found on the internet. While it may be true that small business and mid size companies may not be able to afford information technological expertise, they should at least get a blog based website created for them for a onetime fee. Some government may even dish out incentives for SMEs to create web presence.
A simple blog based website should at least contain an about page, contact me page, testimonial page, product /service offering page, a FAQ page, a sitemap and an integrated blog where the business owner can update and post new items. That way it provides the visitor some basic information and an opportunity to contact you if they needed clarification or a request for quote. By the way a blog can be integrated in various ways to make it interactive and spread and share across different web 2.0 or social media base network. For example, you can pull in a related video from YouTube, display your tweets like what I did on this blog and even to add in pictures to make the site interesting.
Mobile Surfer
As your business grows, you can even start building your own customer database via your blog, with just a simple integration of a web form directing details to an email list. Your repeat customer can be serviced or informed of promotions via your email list.
Hope this help to reinforce the importance of blogs to SME owners.
