You may not always be in the mood to write, but even if you don’t do it every day, your business needs a blog. Blogs are good for a number of things. Here are just a few:

1. They’re sticky. A sticky site is a site that keeps visitors coming back. If you’ve got frequently updated content, visitors will be back to check out what you’ve got. If you’re running a retail site you may only have new items seasonally or even less often, so you’re going to need another reason to keep your site on your customers’ minds and a blog is a great way to do it. While many business blogs focus entirely on what’s new with the business, your blog needn’t do this. Blogging about something related to your business that your customers are likely to find interesting is a great way to keep them glued to your site. If you sell pet grooming services you could do a photo blog of cute cats and dogs. If you sell clothing, a blog with fashion tips might be a good fit. If you sell a service like interior design you might want to start a blog about design trends or home decor if your clients are mostly residential.

2. They provide search engine optimization. Everyone wants the search engines to love their website, and search engines love content. If you want the search engines to show you some love, give ‘em what they want and start writing. Fresh, interesting content on your site will keep the search engines coming back and paying attention to you, which means it’ll be easier for customers to find your site when they’re doing a search. It’s like free advertising!

3. It provides a cross-promotion vehicle. We had to throw that one in there, right? Since we believe cross-promotion is a terrific way to market your brand, we’re all for having as many tools at your disposal as possible to do this. Agreeing to write a post about your marketing partner(s) in exchange for their promise to do the same gives you a no-cost means of trading marketing power with a partner. Posting about a partner doesn’t mean driving customers away from your own business. Choose a marketing partner with a product or service complementary to your own. For extra points, you and your cross-promotion partner might consider giving each other coupon codes to post along with the blog entries.

If you’re not sure how to get a blog onto your company website, there are a few options. My favorite is Wordpress. It’s a free, open-source program you can install on your own web server and you can customize it to look just like the rest of your website. (We actually use Wordpress to host this blog.) You will need PHP and MySQL to run Wordpress, but many web hosts offer those along with their hosting packages. If you don’t have PHP and MySQL, or you aren’t up to installing software yourself, trust me, it’s pretty easy to do. You might want to explore some of the free hosted blogs such as Blogger or Wordpress’s free hosted blog option.

Further Reading:
Hubspot says “How to Build World’s Most Valuable Brand? Don’t Advertise! Use Inbound Marketing“