There are many reasons for a business to invest the effort into a blog, but here are 4 of the top benefits:

#1 It helps your SEO. You are able to add new web content regularly and incorporate the proper keywords. This gives you a bigger website with more info and more keywords. Search engines love that. In fact, it is exactly what they look for.

#2 A good blog provides valuable info to your clients and prospects. When you do this, you get people that want to follow your blog and this leads to loyalty and referrals. Over time, you’ll see people staying at your website longer and more visits. If you give people the ability to then share your blog articles via Facebook and other forums, it leads to an increase in brand awareness.

#3 You build your credibility within your industry. Clearly, a company that is providing quality content established themselves as more credible and as leaders.

#4 It gives people an easy way to follow you and gives you a good reason to reach out to them regularly. We all know that if you want repeat business and referrals you need to keep your name and face in front of the client- especially past clients. But how do you do that without coming across as “spammy” or “pushy”? Answer– good blog content. When you have an interesting article posted on your blog, you can email it out to your database and you come across as being “helpful” and “informative”. There are specific email strategies that will get your emails read about 60% of the time or more! Compare that to the eNewsletters that many businesses send that get opened about 15% of the time.

Now, beyond blogging, you would need to make a decision on whether or not developing company Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages is a worthwhile venture. The absolute bottom line is that hard and fast ROI is nearly impossible to calculate from FB, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It’s more about exposure, brand awareness, and social credibility (the more people that “like” you, the more a new visitor will think that you are a credible and good business). But, investing the time and money into those media may or may not be worth it to you. One thing for sure, those things take time, lots of time, to develop and grow. It may take a year of effort to start seeing results. It is definitely NOT for every business.

But whether or not you go all out with FB or Twitter or LinkedIn, there are still great benefits from blogging. That’s why I recommend that first over everything else. If you look at almost any company in any industry who is getting significant web traffic and search engine rankings, you will notice that nearly all have blogs built in to their websites.  If you haven’t started blogging yet, there is no time like the present to kick it into gear!