Why Small Businesses need to start Blogging NOW

Recently I was meeting with a potential client and we were discussing a few things. Mainly, he wants to increase his rankings in the local markets for flower sales. I gave him my plan of attack and started to explain link building through blogging and why it is important that we do. I am actually working on a sample blog article for him right now so he may better understand the link building process and why it is what he needs to be doing.

Most small businesses feed off of the local market. Good news! Google now has rearranged it’s search engine algorithms to give local market small businesses a better chance of showing up in the search engine rankings. The number one way to gain higher search engine rankings is through link building. Blogs are probably the best and easiest way to acquire a good amount of links over time. Those links in turn will give you the extra “link boost” that your site needs in order to be in the ever so important top 3 rankings for the local market.

That part he gets, the part where I was starting to lose him was how to maintain a blog and how exactly I was going to use it to get people to link back to his site. I hope to answer that question for all of you by the end of this article. For an example I am going to use Reggie’s Tires a local tire dealer. Okay here I am at Reggie’s Tires on Main Street and I have my website all set up, my blog is all set up, now what do I do? I know that I need to create quality, interesting content, and content that people will find useful in order to receive any links from outside sources. So I come up with my idea for this article and it is going to be called “The Ultimate Buyer’s Guide to Buying New Tires.”

Now, while that might not be the most interesting article in the world to the entire population, it is very interesting to someone who is searching for a new set of tires online. Next you are going to promote that blog article in as many ways as you can possibly think of, email, social media, maybe you’ll even call a few people who you think might be interested in your article. After the people read your article they are either going to read it and find it useful and even possibly link to it, or they won’t. Let’s say you contacted 100 people and you got 10 people to link to your article (a pretty good number of links) Google is going to read those links to that article, and give Reggie’s Tires a boost in the search engines when someone in your area is searching for tires online.

Keys to Link Building Success

1. Create quality and useful content: Keep that content related to your site however. If Reggie’s Tires wrote an article about the “Top 10 deserts EVER” while he might have an opinion on that, a person who is potentially buying tires from Reggie, doesn’t care what his favorite deserts are.
2. Be persistent: In order to dominate your local online markets you need to have more links than the rest of the competition. Don’t expect to get 100 links from one article. Link building takes time, it’s also very time consuming, but just stick with it and I promise you you will see results.
3. Forget your Competitors: A lot of small businesses have the habit of focusing a lot of their efforts worried about what ‘the other guy’ is doing. The internet is the way of the future, if your competitors aren’t blogging yet, they should be, don’t let what they are doing deter you from grabbing the bull by the horns yourself. You’ll be ahead of your local competition if you are the first to act.

I hope that answers a lot of questions any of you might have. If you have more please don’t hesitate to leave a comment and I’ll respond to it as quickly as I can. If you don’t have a blog set up, get to work, you’re going to come out of this economic downturn on top, so work hard and you’ll be FAR ahead of everyone else.