Company Blog: Why Your Small Business Needs One

Look around the Internet today at some of your favorite businesses' websites, and you'll see that nearly every one of them has a company blog.

Despite what your mother may have told you about doing things because everyone else is doing them, there are a few excellent reasons to start a company blog—even if you don't consider yourself a blogger.

Truly and honestly, anyone can blog about their industry (and the person that can't produce a few paragraphs a week about their chosen industry should probably get out of the industry). You're the expert—show your customers your expertise in your field.

Let's look at a few great reasons to start a company blog and start reaping the rewards.

Adding a blog to your company website is an amazing opportunity to do those things Google loves to see: update and add new, unique content.

Without a blog, how are you going to update your content and keep search engines interested? The greatest collection of website pages in the world is going to lose pagerank if you never do anything with it, and one of the best things you can do to keep organic traffic is to continuously update your blog and show that you're still relevant.

A lot of your website is devoted to your own company: product specs, service options, contact information, company history, and so on. Customers obviously benefit from having the information they need right at their fingertips—but where's the customer's voice?

A blog gives your customers a venue to sound off on what's important and relevant to them. They can respond to blog posts by leaving comments, and they can respond to each other—something your regular website doesn't provide.

As Chris Brogan says, your customers are always the story. With each individual blog post, you have an opportunity to place your customer at the center of that post and really drive home how your company fits their needs.

We've all seen poorly worded copy where it's apparent the owner was more concerned with SEO than grammar—an instant turnoff. The fact is, it's a challenge to balance good copy with good SEO. As an SEO copywriter by day and an editor by night, I have a strong appreciation for those writers who know how to balance the two worlds.

So how do you use keywords while still sounding professional? Simple: when the topic of your blog post is your keyword, it's a breeze to repeat it often enough for the search engines to take notice—without sounding like a robot.

And, since it's easy to target a different keyword with every post, it's a cinch to experiment with different terms; any decent blogging platform should give you great access to your site statistics so you can keep an eye on the trends.

It's hard to find good content. SEO farms crank out pages after pages of content barely fit for human consumption (too bad there isn't an FDA of the Internet!), and in the meantime, your average browser just wants to locate good information without being sold to at every turn.

With a blog, you can engage readers on a level that's entirely outside of sales. Sure, ideally you want your readers to become your customers, but treating your blog like a weekly press release is a great way to alienate those readers.

Each blog post should be valuable to someone independently of any product or service you're offering. With my company blog, since my company provides business incorporation and copyright services, I try to post once or twice a week with articles on intellectual property and business in general, subjects I think my readers will be especially interested in. If they decide they'd like to look into our services, they can find them—but those services aren't being crammed down their throats, and there's no pressure to convert.

A company that provides its readers with value without any explicit expectations placed on them to buy will build up more and more reader goodwill. If your readers find your articles particularly valuable, they'll share them with others. Could you ask for better advertisement?

If you don't have a company blog . . . what are you waiting for?