Why blogging is the best way to communicate for a small business?

A lot of people know how powerful the blogosphere is. You can in couple of hours spread a great buzz about a new product, or discredit a customer services in couple of lines. It is also one of the greatest asset for a small business to boost its communication. Indeed, the blogging activities have some attributes that can't be match with any other kind of media. Here are couple of advantages for a small business.

Low cost solution
A blog could be theoretically free. Most of the platforms, wordpress or blogger are free, you just need to join and then you post. Isn't it great, especially when you know you can have access to more than 50% of the US population? At least, the blog will cost you a dozen of dollars if you decide to pick a more sophisticated plateform like Typepad, and buy a domain name, which I recommend for search engine optimization purposes

Search engine optimization

A blog is way more powerful than a standard website on a SEO point of view. Indeed, whenever you post an article, it creates its own web page, and then multiple the number of pages that will be referenced on google. Also, if you add always proper tags to your article, it will be more efficient, and Google will take it into account while browsing your blog. Let's not forget also that on the contrary of Flash-built websites, blogs are mainly text, which is also a great help for Google. Also, because of its form, it is easy to add some pages. Blogs are for sure the best way to get a nice search engine ranking, fast, and with low effort.


A way to expose your knowledge and that you are up-to-date with your market
A blog is something very reactive, that will allow you to communicate on an information within very few moments. If you need to place a new information on your website, it will probably mean that you need to edit your website, which is most of the time complex and long. With a blog, you could do it from a cellphone. This reactivity is a great plus, especially while people are looking for fresh news.

Trigger people to come back often
Because a blog is always evolving with fresh information, that incite people to come back often to check the news. How many times will you come back on a corporate website? The form and what it has been designed for is far away from allowing you to communicated on a daily basis. If you post new comments often, people will come back at you. Also, how many times I had people sending me emails to let me know they were expecting for new articles while I was on vacation.

Help to build relationships
A blog is about discussing. People can leave comments, contact you to get more information. I have been able over the last past year to build a great professional network mainly thanks to my blogging activities. You'll be able to meet peer colleagues, but also some potential buyers. People react better after having read an article than after exploring a corporate websites.

Learn more about your business

On a personal point of view as a small business, by blogging, you will be forced to document yourself, seek for information, and explore the different resources the web will offer you. This activity is great. It is like monitoring the market, knowing the competition and potential opportunities. By blogging, you also become aware of what is happening, and more reactive.

Is there other ones that I forgot? Probably. Blogging is a great activity. But I also have to warn you. Blogging is not for anyone. I believe, from my point of view and my experience that blogging requires you to dedicate time and a real will to write. If you don't feel any pleasure  at writing, there are a lot of chances you will fail. You have questions? You want to share something?Feel free to leave me a comment.

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A great example of how blogging can help small businesses

I attended today a seminar organized by real estate agents Steve Leung and Alex Wang, here in our office at Mountain View, California. The particularity of these two agents is that they use their blogs as one of their key ways to generate leads. Especially Steve Leung is a very successful blogger who can count on a strong audience to promote his work.

Indeed, here are some stats that Steve shared with us about his blog which he started back in 2006:

• Between 150-300 readers a day
• 233 RSS feed subscribers
• About 1.5 leads a day in average
• Ranked n1 for real estate silicon valley blog
  

Therefore, they wanted to set up a workshop talking about blogging and search engine optimization for small businesses, in order to share their experiences.
I have already attended a workshop on search engine optimization organized this time by WSI that I talked about in my blog here. But this one was mainly focus on a website point of view. This time, Steve exposed the different strengths of a blog versus a website to build a strong audience and to generate leads out of it.

As an experienced blogger now I know quite a few about search engine optimization techniques about  blogging, but I learned so much about Steve that it was really worthwile. In particular, Steve gave us some examples of search engine fraud, how they work, and why these techniques could become really bad as you might be kicked out of Google.

Why is blogging particularly well adapted to small business?
According to a study established by Nielsen in 2006, 70% of consumers use search engines to find local services. Also 54% of them referred the business to their friend. That means that search engines are the new yellow pages, and if you have a great ranking, that will help you a lot to attract new customers. Blogging is the cheapest and most efficient way to optimize your search engine ranking, and for many structural reasons (each post is a new page with its own title, category, among others).
I also like the idea that a website is updated when it is outdated, because it is very true. A blog is never outdated as you constantly have new information in it. Also you still store the old information to use it as a leverage for the search engines. Therefore, it is easier to keep an updated blog than an updated website, and that is also the main reason why people should have a blog more than a "business card website", which can be cool too but will never generate leads.

He also shows some very good techniques on how to analyze your search engine results, and how to improve it. I will share some of them with you in some next topics.

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Internet strategies for small businesses and search engine optimization

I attended yesterday a seminar held by Sanjay Singh from WSI. The seminar was discussing about Internet and small businesses, and more specifically on search engine.

Indeed, we talked in detail on how search engine works, what components they are seeking for their rankings. We also saw how to buy key words on search engine, especially on a small business prospective. Thus, you have to be smart and get away from overcrowded words that you won't be able to afford nor get any interesting leads.

That was very interesting to have Sanjay sharing his expertise with us, and giving us operational techniques to enhance search engine ranking for small businesses. Especially because the seminar was held in a small crowd, with people from small businesses of different industries: real estate, industrial, dotcoms...

For example, even though I know a lot about websites, I did not know that you could and should have meta descriptions for all your pages. Also, he show some concrete examples on how small businesses such as real estate agents, car retailer or semi conductor producers have been able to use the Internet to find new leads and prospects.

He gave me a lot of good ideas to implement on our agents' websites.

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