Five Reasons For Small Business Owners To Blog

Why do small business owners write on blogs?

With millions of people worldwide doing it, blogging has become a major phenomenon of our time. (If you arrived here through a search engine and do not know what a blog is, well, you are reading one right now.)

I’ve been tagged by Troy White and Edita Kaye of the Rich Writers blog, to give five reasons that I write a blog. So here goes. Blogging is:

• A faster and better way to create newsletter articles. Four years ago I used to place newsletter articles online either by sending each one to a Web design firm (an expensive option), or doing it myself using Dreamweaver (a time-consuming option). Then I found blogs and discovered the freedom of posting articles online quickly and easily. The whole process of publishing became much more satisfying, too, because I found I have greater control. For instance, if I happen to notice a small typo or a left-out word, I can change it in seconds. Because of the many advantages of blogs, this site has since taken on a much bigger purpose in my business. But in the beginning I merely was solving a simple problem: finding a better way for my small business to publish newsletter articles.

• A strategy for getting published. Publishing my own articles on the Web, daily, was the fastest and most direct path to getting published at magazines and other business publications. Once I had enough articles published here at Small Business Trends for readers to judge my ideas and writing ability, I naturally started to get the attention of magazines and business publishers. A track record always helps.

• A low-cost way for a small business owner to market online. You can spend a little or a lot marketing your business online. I choose to spend a little. A blog gives a small business a fighting chance to get found in the search engines, alongside the sites of big companies that have more money to spend. I learned that after I set up this site. One day, someone pointed out to me that when my name was searched online, my blog showed up higher in the search results than my traditional business website. That’s when I decided to focus my efforts on this blog instead of the traditional website.

• A method to communicate and connect — especially important for business owners. When you run a small business, as I do, you feel alone at times. We may be in business, but in the end we are human beings — isolation is a real issue. We blogging business owners actually communicate with one another, online, using our blogs. You can’t do that with a traditional style website. For instance, I have never met Troy or Edita. The very fact that they “tagged” me by writing an article and linking to my site (thank you Troy and Edita!), demonstrates one way we communicate with one another and establish connections. This is one of the things people mean when they use the now-overworked phrase, “blogs are conversations.”

• Satisfaction of some inner need to share. Many of us have a strong desire to exchange opinions and ideas with others. It must be an instinctive human need. How else do you explain 70 million blogs?

Why do you blog? Or, if you do not currently blog, tell us the reason you do not.