Blogging offers a wide range of potential benefits for both small businesses and nonprofits. Every now and then, we’ll run into someone who says “Oh, I won’t do a blog, because that’s giving information away for free.” While, yes, blogging does mean sharing some of your expertise without receiving direct payment, there’s still a return on that investment when you approach blogging strategically.
Here are four benefits of blogging for small business and nonprofits.
Give people a chance to get to know you
Blogging is a great way to let people get to know you better and decide if they want to do business with you. Whether you’re professional and straight-to-the-point or fun and quirky – blogging helps express who you are to your audience. At the end of the day, your audience wants to feel connected to you and your business. People do business with people they know, like, and trust, and blogging opens that door.
Showcase your expertise
You started a business because you had something unique to share with the world, so showcase it! Blog about topics that matter to your audience and demonstrate your knowledge and expertise. This is often where the argument of not wanting to give things away for free comes up, but there’s a difference between blogging about certain topics to showcase your expertise and giving away your services for free.
Improve your SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is all about helping people find your website online. Google’s algorithm for search results changes pretty regularly, but we know that the quality of the content matters. Choose blog topics that you know people are searching for and create high-quality content related to those topics to help improve your SEO. Blogging also updates your website regularly, which makes the Google web crawlers happy too.
Send some goodwill into the world
There are going to be people who read your blog but never do business with you, and that’s okay. Maybe they don’t have the budget to work with you, but they still found what you shared useful. You’ve helped someone and put some goodwill into the world, and that’s a good thing.
These four benefits of blogging can help small businesses and nonprofits grow their audience and their business over time.
If you need help getting started with a consistent blogging strategy for your business, reach out to us at StoryPath Communications today to talk about our monthly blogging packages.