Why Every Business Needs a Blog

Short answer: Quick and easy access to online content management.

Oh, you want the long answer too? Here’s five great reasons to build a blog for your business website starting with the most obvious answer.

Easy to Use

If you don’t believe me when I say its easy to set up a blog, go to Blogspot right now and you could have your own blog ready to go in about five or ten minutes. While its a little bit trickier to actually host your own blog, it still requires (at most) an FTP connection and running a few installation scripts. From there, creating new content is as easy as thinking of something to write and actually writing (err typing) it down.

Pagerank

Building up new pages of unique content and getting links from relevant sources can help you pass along some pagerank and anchor text inheritance to your sales pages and main domain portal. Whatever page you want to rank for, whatever keywords you want to see traffic for – you’ll be able to set up your blog to collect and pass some of that rank along. If you already have a ton of PR on your domain home, you can use that leverage in the other direction to make sure your blog’s posts start off ranking well. Link them each to the other, but just put “nofollow” on the side that doesn’t need the extra PR juice. (I don’t have a problem with “nofollow” for internal linking ;))

Longtail

People don’t just search one or two keyword combinations when they’re online. The longtail in this sense refers to those longer search phrases that are individually unique, yet collectively massive. The more you write, the more longtail search traffic you’ll naturally pick up as you order and arrange your words on a topic in a unique way. As you dig into the many aspects of a concept, product, or service – you’ll create more content that more perfectly matches what people are looking for.

There are pears, green pears, and Korean green pears: Just because you rank for pears doesn’t mean you’ll sell as many Korean green pears as someone who happened to blog about it.

Community

Nothing is better than bringing people together who share a passion for something. If your business is really filling a need in peoples’ lives, then there’s also a chance that you can build up a community that represents the beneficiaries of your transactions. Online communities are fairly anonymous and temporary, but they are a new type of community and provides many of those type of benefits like word of mouth. There’s nothing quite like having an ally in your customers – make sure they have a place to be heard!

Reputation Management

And sometimes, the community isn’t happy with your business action… Blogs can be an additional ally in the fight to maintain your reputation. What do I mean? Well, if you have to apologize you might as well blog it. Trust me, the social networks are pretty keen to see a good apology. Don’t you think those politicians know what they’re doing when they have those press conferences to renounce their prior words, tactics, or actions? Now, don’t try to fake it – be honest and bend toward the interests of those who are mad at you in the first place. Better yet, don’t make them mad at all!

Common Sense? Heck Yeah!

Don’t hire a consultant for 40 hours just so they can tell you to build a blog for your business, just skip that step and hire someone to set up the blog. Or do it yourself! The key though, is to do it – because even if you only derive one of the five listed benefits you’re probably still going to break into the profitability margin. I can say this pretty confidently as blog hosting costs less than $10 a month and a blog only takes a few moments to set up. Every piece of unique content you add from there is going to add some depth to your site and some presence in the search engines.

So yeah, just build the blog. I know, I know, you’re a serious business and you don’t think blogs are very serious or professional. So why are bloggers getting paid so much money?

Because a blog is just a tool with a certain function, and proper use of a tool creates value.