1. You can communicate with your clients and/or potential clients. By blogging regularly, you can develop relationships with people who read your blog. You can interact with people, and through frequent interaction, you may also begin to build trust with your readers.
2. You can position yourself as an expert in your industry. If you are able to provide you readers with educational content that they were not aware of previously, you can position yourself as an authority in your field.
3. Blogging is inexpensive. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on a website, you can actually set up a blog for free. An example of a free platform is Blogger.com.
4. You can answer frequently asked questions. If you get many of the same questions over and over again, you can answer these questions on your blog. This way, people can just refer to your blog if they have questions that are common.
5. You can brand yourself to a much wider audience. By having an online presence through your blog, your business is exposed to (literally) a global audience - as opposed to only the people who walk into your business.
As you can see, blogging can be extremely beneficial in helping to grow your business. If you don't have a blog yet, definitely consider creating one.
Some great free blog sites are available where you can create your new blog in minutes or you can register your own domain the put a blog on or add it to your existing site. Some good blog platforms are:
Blogger
Wordpress
Blogengine.net
Word press is my favourite out of these as it is very customisable, has a great back end and there are literally thousands of free themes for you to choose from. You are not stuck with the free themes though and you can have one custom built, build one yourself or even purchase one of the many premium themes available. However blogger is also very good and blog engine net is another that is extremely customisable and is built with search engine optimisation purposes in mind
In the world of small business and franchise blogs there are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs out there so the aim is to get your notices by ensuring a good theme is chosen or built and good quality fresh content is written for it regularly, preferable daily but really just whenever you have something to say.
For me the no1 benefit of having a blog is search engine optimisation - in your blog you can enter keyword rich content which perhaps your site layout can only contain so much of. With the right keyword research and good content built around those keywords you could be generating a minimum of a few hundred extra website visitors per day to inform your services too or sell your product too.
