Build Community: Business blogs provide your small business with a chance to share your expertise and knowledge with a larger audience. An opportunity to connect with a wider audience and build a community is a strong benefit for consultants and knowledge workers.
Easy Web Publishing Solution: Blog software is easy to use. Simply write your thoughts, link to resources, and publish to your blog, all at the push of a few buttons. Blog software companies such as TypePad or Blogger.com offer easy blogging tools to get started. Updating the weblog is a faster process than contacting a web designer with changes or doing the coding and uploading yourself.
Higher Search Engine Rankings: Search engine marketing is hot. The search market has become the Holy Grail of Internet advertising and continues to grow faster than our expectations. We believe search is actually gaining some market share from other types of online marketing.
Lower Costs: Blogging is a low-cost alternative to having a web presence. For small business owners without the time to learn web html or the money to hire a designer/developer, blogging offers an inexpensive method to get your company's name out on the Internet.
Better Communications: Blogging provides several communication benefits. As indicated by Business Weeks’ Olga Kharif in Blogging for Business Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban sees blogging as a time saver instead of providing many interviews blogging gets his message out to many people at once.
Internal links – Blogs that post product or service related information can deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for ranking on long tail phrases.
Inbound link magnet – One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other – much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, thus encouraging links and traffic.
RSS – Links to RSS feed urls that use the blog domain name will assist in building link popularity and when RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic.
Non-Search traffic – I think the greatest benefit of having an active blog has little to do with improving your search engine rankings though. The best thing about blogs is that they allow you to generate substantial amounts of traffic via RSS and links that have NOTHING to do with search engines. My recommendation to marketers in 2007 is to pursue traffic alternatives to search engines as aggresively as their budgets and marketing programs will allow. The result will be incremental increases in site traffic with search engine referred traffic an added bonus, if not correspondingly enhanced.
Brand Promotion – By hosting your own blog, it will be easier to develop and promote your own brand. Even if you are not selling something, hosting your own blog will provide greater individuality than what shared hosting can offer.
