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Why Your Small Business Needs a Blog

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Why We Recommend Having a Blog

We’ve been recommending our clients maintain a blog for some time now. From a strictly SEO perspective, there are many ways to leverage regular blog posts for increased visibility and link popularity on the web and via social media.

Why Your Small Business Needs a Blog

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But there are other benefits of having a blog as well.

  • Hidden Value of a BlogA blog brings out your humanity. For whatever reason, when we write a blog, we write more personally than when we write a web page. Our personality and our passions shine in our blog posts. That makes us more approachable and more attractive to do business with.
  • Blog posts very often focus on the customer and not our business. We want to address their problems, even if only to convince them that we have the solution. Focusing on their issues helps us relate to our customers and helps them relate to us.
  • Blog posts often tell a story. Storytelling has a long tradition in the human condition for illustrating how the experiences of others may be relevant to our own lives. It’s an extremely effective marketing technique.
  • Blogs help you to listen and show your customer base that you listen and are responsive. Once your blog becomes popular, customers and potential customers will comment or ask questions. That forces you to respond to their concerns, and as you do that you show why they should deal with you rather than some less personal company.

Tangible and Intangible Benefits

The benefit of helping to generate better link popularity is a pretty tangible benefit of maintaining an active blog. But this list of intangible benefits has the potential to be equally important to your business.

If you need guidance in setting up a blog or help in promoting your blog posts for increased visibility, Rank Magic can help.

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Do Links From Blog Posts Help Your Link Authority?

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Blog posts are really just web pages

So a link to your site from a blog post counts just like any other link. But there are a couple of considerations to bear in mind in terms of how beneficial the blog links will be for you.

The value of the link is a function of three things:

  • The authority of the blog post linking to you (higher is better)
  • The number of outbound links on that blog post (lower is better)
  • Whether the blog post is on your domain or not (being on another domain adds some weight to the link)
Do Links From Blog Posts Help Your Link Authority?

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How about links from your own blog?

If you’re concerned about links from your own blog posts, let’s discuss that last issue a bit. We always recommend that our clients host their blogs on their own websites rather than on another domain. Does that mean links from a blog post to pages on your own website count less than if your blog was on another domain? Actually, yes — a bit. But don’t worry.

Links to your web pages from blog posts on your own domain may be somewhat less powerful than they would be if from another domain, but not enough to make up for the loss of authority you’d suffer from hosting your blog on another domain. So don’t move your blog off your domain just so the links back are a tad more beneficial. Unless you devote time and attention to building link equity on the external blog domain in addition to your main domain, the authority links impart to your main domain will be very low. Instead, syndicate your blog.

And links from your blog post to other pages on your site actually helps with the target page’s relevance. These internal, contectual links can be very valuable.

Syndication

When you write a blog post, you can have it duplicated on blog aggregators, and the links to your web pages from those copies of your post will count as external inbound links. There are lots of these available to you  — as an example, see Business2Community or BlogEngage.

Done right, your blog can help your link authority at the same time that it funnels potential customers into the marketing content on your website. That’s certainly a winning proposition.

For professional help with maximizing your blogging power, SEO for your website, or building link authority, contact us at Rank Magic.

 

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A Cool Half-Dozen Reasons You Need a Blog Now

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Six reasons you need a blog.Do you really need a blog?

Once you have a blog, you can easily leverage it to spread your brand, gain authority in your field, and greatly improve your visibility on the Internet. Here are six reasons a blog will pay you back all out of proportion to the effort it takes to maintain it.

Why your small business needs a blog now!

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  1. Interact with clients & prospects. Write provocative posts that generate comments and questions. You can respond and establish both authority and accessibility at the same time.
  2. Gain Directory Links. You can list your blog in perhaps two dozen blog directories. If your blog is hosted on your website domain (it should be!) then all those links  help your website’s link popularity. See Bloggapedia, Blogarama, and BlogHub.
  3. Syndication Possibilities — other blogs may re-post your blog posts for their readers, dramatically extending your range of influence. Plus you get backlinks that hepl your website rankings.
  4. Social Media canspread the word about your blog.Social Media Exposure — You can set up your blog so every post automatically gets listed on your Facebook Fan Page. The periodic updates there keep your fans engaged. You can also easily post a link to your blog post at other social media sites: Digg, Mix, Reddit, LinkedIn, Merchant Circle and so forth. That expands your reach and also generates backlinks.
  5. Real Time Exposure via Twitter. Tweet each blog post as you publish it to get the word out to your followers. Others interested in what you do will find you and follow you. You can see ours here.
  6. You can even push your blog out on Kindle and actually earn money when people subscribe to it!

Yes, having a blog takes a certain amount of discipline to write at least one good post a month, but it can rally pay off in your branding and your visibility on the web. We can share some time-saving and labor-saving ideas that we’ve put into practice for our own blog. Call and ask how we can help.

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