If you’re a business owner like me, you may have heard people tell you that you should be blogging. This is probably met with some healthy skepticism on your part, since blogging is for geeks, right? At first I thought the same thing. After all, I thought, I have a Web site. Why should I bother doing a blog? Who reads those blogs anyway?

The truth is that blogging is probably one of the most highly influential activities you can undertake to help your business. Best of all, it’s 100% free marketing once you set it up. Personally, I love “free”. Yes, it takes some time, but the more you do it, the better (and thus faster) you get at it. If you’re just totally crunched for time, hire a good copywriter to ghostwrite your blog for you. They’ll charge a reasonable price, and you can have your proverbial cake (see below for the cake part), and eat it too.

So these are my top five reasons why you as a business owner should be blogging.

Reason Number 5: Set Yourself Up As An Expert

We all have an encyclopedia of information in our heads about our business and our specialties. After all, we (hopefully) love our work, and have gotten really good at it. You have specialized knowledge about your niche that other people don’t know. By creating short articles, you can share this information with the world. This makes you an expert in your own industry, no matter how specialized it might be.

I’m asked all the time, “I don’t see anyone else in my industry blogging, so that means I probably shouldn’t either, right?” Wow, exactly the opposite. If you’re lucky enough that there aren’t others blogging in your industry, jump on it NOW. You have a huge advantage over your competitors, before they figure it out. Get cracking and get your articles out there, and beat your competition to it!

Reason Number 4: User Generated Content

Google loves unique content. The more unique it is from other content, the more Google will reward that content with high placement on the search engines. You can write articles, but by allowing other people to comment on your blog articles, that makes them 100% unique. Best of all, other people are creating that content for you, and you don’t have to do anything. (Remember that part where I said I love “free”?)

Furthermore, you can ask other industry experts in a related field to write a blog post for you. They get to have a nice link and their name on someone else’s Web site, and the blog owner gets free content! (There’s that free thing again!)

Reason Number 3: Blogs Are Link Magnets

Anyone who knows anything about getting onto the search engine knows that natural links from other people to your Web site are gold. The more natural links you get, the more it helps you. Blogs have built in tools to help with that. People will naturally link to your articles from their articles, which helps you. You can also enable “trackbacks” which are also a great way of linking from one blog to another.

Finally, you have complete control over the links that you have in your own blog. Therefore, you can create links to other pages on your own Web site, and even links to other articles on your own blog. Always make sure to include your key words in the actual link text. Never make a link that says, “Read more” or “Click here” - it’s a wasted opportunity. Make the actual link text your key phrase. Google counts all these links with your key words and it adds up.

Reason Number 2: Get Onto Google Fast!

If you’ve ever hired a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant, they’ll tell you that it takes weeks or months to get your optimized content onto Google. This is absolutely true, because Google is busy going around crawling all the nooks and crannies of the Web to try to find new stuff. It may take them several weeks before they discover that you wrote this great article on training Pomeranian puppies.

On the other hand, the way blogs are wired, as soon as you push the “Publish” button, it automatically goes out and tells Google that you have new stuff. You should set up your ping servers so that you tell Google directly. I’ve seen blog posts show up on Google in as little as 10 minutes - and even demonstrated this to my students. That’s sure a lot better than 4-6 weeks!

Reason Number 1: Your Search Engine Results Will Defy Logic

Many people spend hours agonizing over key words and trying to “optimize” that content for the search engines (called “SEO”) only to get mediocre results. Because Google rewards fresh content (among many other things), the more you write for your blog, the more you’ll get rewarded with top search engine results.

Type in any phrase into Google and click “Search”. On the right, it will tell you that it’s displaying “Results 1-10 of about xyz”. That xyz value is your competition for your phrase. The higher the number is, the harder it is to get listed at the top. Many times you’ll have millions of pages of competition, and yet, your blog post will show up at the very top for no apparent reason.

Do your key word research first, but then write articles to match the key words. You’ll be rewarded with much better placement than trying to “optimize” a page of content on your Web site. I promise.

Conclusion

Blogs are one of the most powerful tools you can use to generate targeted traffic to your Web site, bar none. If you’re skeptical that no one will read your blog, you’ll never know unless you try. But I personally believe that you’ll be very surprised if you keep at it. And frankly, you don’t have anything to lose, and everything to gain. If you’re not sure where to start, hire an expert who can get you pointed in the right direction.

As business owners, most of us realize the importance of being “top-of-mind” in our customers’ eyes, and we use e-mail newsletters to tell them about new products or information they may not be aware of. Many businesses that use e-mail newsletters to market to their customers however, miss a huge opportunity to help their own online marketing efforts.

E-mail Newsletters Can Help Your Web Site

Online marketing is often referred to as “search engine optimization” or “SEO” or “internet marketing”. The idea is to get your Web site so it shows up in Google’s index of results on the search engine results page or “SERP”. But can an offline tool like e-mail newsletters help your online marketing? The short answer is “Yes!”, and it’s actually quite easy.

Each of us has a pile of expert information in our heads about our respective businesses. It’s kind of like the TV commercial showing the digital camera with all those pictures trapped inside - this valuable information is just clamoring to get out. Many people write newsletters to educate their customers about their industry and how they can help them. This is great, but once someone reads - then deletes - that e-mail, it ceases to exist and have any value.

Repurpose Your Content

An excellent strategy is to take that same e-mail content and repurpose it into different forms for the Internet. Once you’ve taken the effort to write your newsletter, it doesn’t take much more energy to turn it into:

• A post in your blog
• An online press release for Google News
• An article for an online article repository
• A short video on YouTube

With just a little extra effort, you can repurpose your information into a slightly different form that has many potential audiences. In addition, each of these tools will give you an opportunity to extend the longevity of your content by creating online content that people will find through the search engines. The more you do this, the more you’ll be rewarded with top placement on the search engines, often with multiple positions, rather than just one! In addition, you’ll build links to your own Web site naturally, which are extremely valuable for search engine placement.

I Love FREE!

The best news about all this, is that most of these tools are 100% free! With just a little bit of effort, you or your assistant can create multiple streams of marketing messages that different people will find when they’re searching for your services. Since they don’t cost you anything, you just can’t lose.

If you’re just not sure where to start, I highly recommend that you get a copy of David Meerman Scott’s best seller, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”. It’s readily available on Amazon.com and other book retailers. Then pick one tool and start small. Be consistent and put your information out on a regular schedule. You’ll start to see more traffic to your site, and hopefully, more phone calls!