Use Blogs To Help Your Small Business

Monday, February 18, 2008 by Mistlee

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02.18.08

Use Blogs To Help Your Small Business

By Andy Beal

USA Today's Steve Strauss is a recent convert to the value of blogging and in today's "Ask the Expert" he explains how blogs can help small businesses.

Glancing over his list of benefits, I can't help but notice that they all point to why a blog is such a great tool for building your online reputation.

Blogs build a sense of community: By sharing your expertise in a blog, you connect with a lot more people. And as they respond to your posts, a community is created.

They allow you to plug products and services: But importantly, you are not doing so in an abrasive way. Using the conversational style that is the hallmark of a good blog allows you to share business products in a friendlys way.

They boost your search engine optimization (SEO): By their very nature, blogs incorporate the hallmarks of good SEO: Keywords and links. And, as people respond to your blog, more keywords show up.

Blogs help make you an authority: I can tell you that being published, even if it's only your own blog, gives you gravitas.

Blogs give you valuable feedback: By seeing what customers say about your posts, your blog offers valuable feedback.


I might argue a little over the first point. From my experience, few bloggers have successfully created "a sense of community" with their blogs. Even though a blog does offer the chance for you to interact with your readers, a community is very hard to build around a blog. In fact, most of the blogs you see that do have a community following tend to also have a forum or some other type of social network channel. Instead, I'd say that blogs are a great way to build a sense of conversation-in that you do get to open a dialog with your readers.

If you want more ideas of how to use blogs to build your reputation, check out chapter 9 of my new book Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online.

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About the Author:
Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world's most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

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