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20 Compelling Reasons Why Small Businesses Should Blog

Happy Tuesday guys and gals,

Over the weekend, a fellow business owner and entrepreneur shared an interesting statistic via Twitter – “70% of clients prefer to get to know a business through reading articles vs ads”.

This stat prompted me to write today’s blog post to reinforce the importance of blogging for business – especially for small business owners.  

Why small businesses should blog?

As you may know, I am huge proponent of blogging especially and for good reason.  Blogging has opened quite a few doors of opportunity for me online that include getting referenced in a few large publications online (The New York Times), helped me connect with other fellow small business owners and entrepreneurs and has helped drive more traffic to my website. If you want to get serious about blogging, then you should check out this post.

Today, I’m rounding up a list of 20 compelling reasons why small businesses should blog:

Blogging for lead generation:

Blogging businesses experience a 165% lead growth, a much larger increase than that of non-blogging businesses- Hubspot

1. 69% of businesses attribute their lead generation success to blogging- Hubspot
2. 57% of companies with a blog have generated a lead from it – Hubspot
3. 81% of businesses have reported their blog as useful or critical to generating leads – Hubspot
4. One of blogging’s biggest benefits is in its huge potential for lead generation – Hubspot

Blogging to drive traffic to your website:

1. A strategically planned blog, with carefully chosen keywords in play, will show up in search and drive traffic to your landing pages – Hubspot
2. Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links – Hubspot
3. Adding a blog to your site can drastically increase the amount of highly targeted traffic your site gets – Thewebsitepromoter.com
4. Businesses that blog 20 times a month get 5x more traffic than those who blog less than 4 times/month – Hubspot
5. Companies with 51-100 pages on their website generate 48 percent more traffic than those with 1-50 pages – Hubspot

Blogging for marketing purposes:

1. Nearly 40% of US companies use blogs for marketing purposes – Hubspot
2. When you blog, you can connect with your target market and promote your products- Socialana.com
3. A blog is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful inbound marketing tools at your disposal. – Hubspot
4. A blog can be an effective way to bridge the space between product and consumer via entertaining and educational content – Chronicle.com
5. Blogs can serve as low cost marketing and promotional tool for business growth – Shiftcentral.com 

Blogging to build trust with your audience and branding:

1. 81% of U.S. online consumers trust information and advice from blogs. – Blogher
2. With blogging, if you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes – Hubspot
3. Great blogs can help your brand build authority in your niche – Kissmetrics
4. If you want to create a hub of authority on your own website, then your blog is the place –Builtvisible.com
5. Any good authority building campaign should start with a business blog – Search Engine Journal

As you can see, blogging for your business has many benefits.  I urge you all to start a small business blog to drive traffic, start connecting with customers in your industry and building your online business presence.

If you are ready to supercharge your small business with a blog, here’s a step by step tutorial that I’ve put together to get you started.