You started a small business with high hopes and a superior product or service. You spent countless hours getting your business plan on paper, renovating or building a physical location, creating a mission and vision statement, and tweaking your logo until it’s just right. Now you’re hearing that your business needs a blog to reach your potential customers.

Seriously? A blog? One of those silly online diaries that is best done by middle school girls? Isn’t it enough that you suffer through updating your social media?

If this sounds like you, you’re not alone. And despite any pain it may cause you to get it up and running, you need a business website with a business blog.

Because in today’s business world, your business will never reach its fullest potential without wielding the power of blog posts. Why do the smartest business owners include their business blog as an integral part of their business model?

You’re about to find out.

1. Quality Blog Content Grows Brand Awareness

Smart business owners are constantly looking for new and novel ways to drive traffic to their online or physical businesses. While paid ads (such as Google Adwords or Instagram ads) are essential for increasing site traffic, you’ll find your target audience at a much better price with quality content on your business blog.

How much better is the price? With blog posts, the only cost you’ll be paying is to hire someone to create fresh content on your behalf.

Feel you’re a competent writer and prefer to do it on your own? It will only cost you time. As a blogger, you’ll need some understanding of search engine optimization, and there is plenty of information out there about it. So be sure to do your homework before cramming relevant keywords into your posts.

Once you get people’s attention and gain some brand recognition, you’ll be equally excited about the next benefit of writing business blog posts.

2. Your Business Blog Attracts Customers

You started your business for a few reasons. You knew you could provide a superior product or service, you want to serve your customers well, and you want to make money.

Successful businesses are run by people who make as much money as possible. Not because they want to be greedy. Rather, because successful businesses are run by people with true passion for what they’re doing. These entrepreneurs truly believe that anyone not buying their product or service is not living a full life.

If this sounds like you, bringing new customers to your doorstep isn’t just nice. It’s a way to make sure you’re serving people. A business blog brings potential customers to you, while you’re sleeping or working. And you don’t even need a sales team to make it happen.

How does it work? By getting your content on Google search and other search engines. So when someone is looking for information in your realm of expertise, your website pops up to give the answer. In other words, your business blog is a marketing tool with the power to draw in high-quality leads and inform existing customers.

What’s not to love?

3. Blog Entries on Your Business Website Position You as an Expert

You may have the best product or service available. You may have customer service that is unparalleled. But guess what? No one will know about it if you don’t also position yourself as an expert.

Because while your friends may know you’re the best in the business, you don’t have enough friends to pay the bills. So you’ve got to show total strangers that you know what you’re talking about.

How? By talking about it! Blog posts and content marketing give you an opportunity to post relevant content that site visitors are seeking. Figure out common questions people are asking and then answer them!

Keep pushing relevant info on your post, and you’ll gradually see your search engine ranking improve. Why? Because Google recognizes that you know what you’re talking about, and you’re giving valuable information.

As a result, your website will be among the first to show up in search results. And on the Internet, if you’re not first (or at least on the first page of search results), you may as well pack it up and go home.

4. Quality Blog Posts Level the Playing Field

Today, reaching your target audience has never been easier for small business owners. Thanks to Google, Twitter, and Facebook ads, you have the same power as the titans of business. You just have to be willing to pay.

Again, paid ads are vital to a well-rounded marketing campaign. But you shouldn’t rely on them alone. Produce solid blog articles week after week, month after month, and you can drive more quality traffic to your website than you could imagine.

Wish you could build your email list? Start creating relevant content and let Google do its thing. Better yet, lend it a hand by linking to it from your social media accounts. Then write a blog article for someone else and link back to your site again.

Combining high-quality blog posts with a social media post is a win-win that can take your small business to new heights.

5. Content Creation Demands a Schedule

Want to get blog traffic? It can’t happen on accident. You’ve got to create original content regularly to fight your way to the top of search engine results and stay there. This means your small business website should have a content strategy that involves frequent new blog posts.

It may sound scary to write and post and promote articles on a weekly or monthly basis. Especially if you’re not a blogger and are a sole proprietor. But you didn’t get into business because it’s easy did you?

Of course not. Besides, you need more structure. Writing a blog post on a regular basis gets you into a marketing rhythm. It reminds you that things need to be done every day, every week, and every month to keep your business front and center, where it can be found with ease by anyone seeking your services.

Remember the marketing campaign you started three weeks late? A company blog schedule could have helped remedy that. You would have had marketing on the brain already. The call to action would have been mapped out weeks in advance. And your social network would have been ready to receive your message, because you would have kept in touch with them on a regular basis.

Want some help developing a successful blog for your business? Wish you didn’t have to figure out what to write or find time to write it? Let me write your SEO content. We will discuss goals for your business website and how we can work together to make it happen. If we decided to work together, I’ll start writing blog entries on your behalf about industry trends and other information to position you as an industry expert. Before you know it, your small business blog will go from dead weight to a lead-generation tool!