“Successful blogging is not about one time hits. It’s about building a loyal following over time.” – David Aston

Traditionally advertising was conducted by using print media, broadcast media and outdoor media. However, in the recent times advertising is also conducted digitally i.e. through the internet. One of the most popular forms of digital advertising is through blogging.

So what is a blog? Blog is a regular record of your thoughts, opinions or experiences that you put on the internet for other people to read.

If you take a look at the time when blogging started it was in the year 1993. A couple of major blogging platforms like WordPress got a start in early 2000s. By mid 2000s various businesses recognised the need to use blogging as a marketing tool to grab customers’ attention.

Numerical data shows us that the internet users in India have steadily increased from 189.6 million users to 503 million users between the years 2013 to 2017. So it is evident that the number of bloggers too are going to increase in the future. It is estimated that the number of bloggers are expected to reach 31.7 million by the year 2020.

Blogs for small business owners should be able to draw new readers to their website in order to establish healthy customer relationships. Blog examples of business should be written on topics that cover relevant informative posts, home based business blog, celebrity interviews, share your customer feedback, products and services offered by the organisation, vision and mission, future plans, success stories of your customers.

Read:-What Does a Small Business Owner Do?

Engaging with your customers is a very crucial part of marketing your business. Blogging provides an excellent opportunity to connect with your existing and prospective customers in an interactive manner. It allows you to show a more personal side to your business.

One of the advantages of blogging for small business is that you can use that content in more than one place. So the blogs can be posted across various social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn by sharing the link to the blog. You can also tweet and email these blog posts or share personal blogs on Instagram. This is definitely the ultimate free marketing tool.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is extremely useful for marketers. SEO is a process of making your website more noticeable to the people who enter keywords related to your business using search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and so on. Blogging can be used by small businesses to elevate the SEO quality by making your website the answer to your customer’s questions.

Read:-How To Get More Website Traffic For Your Small Business

Every small business aims to endorse their brands. Consistent blogging is an effective method to create brand awareness by providing relevant and useful content for the target audience. Blogging enables to attract more customers to your brand message in comparison to the outbound marketing procedures and techniques.

Blogs need not be updated every day, you must ensure that at least it is updated once a week. As far as the length of the content is concerned, you must focus on creating interesting and persuading blogs for your customers.

One of the biggest drawbacks faced by small businesses is the lack of insufficient funds. Blogging as a marketing tool is more economical and also reaches out to more number of customers in comparison to other forms of advertising.

Blogging for your business is the best way to build trust and confidence in your target audience through high-quality content that is relevant to them.

Story By: Shruti Swaminathan