9 Reasons Why Every Small Business Needs a Blog and How You Can Quickly Start Your Own
Blogging is alive and well in 2025, and it can be a big benefit for small businesses looking to build their brand and customer base, while costing minimal overhead. With the prevalence of free and low-cost blogging platforms on the internet, it’s easier than ever to create one and start seeing an increase in your business’s digital footprint. The proof is in the numbers:
- Websites with blogs generate 67% more leads
- Blogging leads to 434% more indexed pages in search engines
- 83% of customers trust blogs when looking for product recommendations
You — Yes, You — Need a Business Blog
You probably have multiple goals for your business and its marketing. Not just boosting leads, but also building your brand, driving more traffic, and supporting a long-term relationship with your customers.
Good news: a blog can help with all of them.
#1. It can establish your authority and expertise.
We talked about the importance of authenticity in our recent article on how to engage on social media; today’s consumers want to work with companies that give off “realness,” so to speak. Sharing your knowledge and insights through consistent blog posts and articles can be incredibly useful in your efforts to present yourself as a credible, knowledgeable voice in your industry, which in turn means potential customers are more likely to trust you and turn to you for information.
#2. It can boost you in search engines.
There are different ways of approaching search engine optimization, but two of the most effective tactics are integration of keyword phrases, especially targeted, longtail keyword phrases, and the regular uploading of new content. If you only have a static webpage, it’s difficult to naturally and consistently add new, fresh content. You’re also limited in the keywords and phrases you can target. Having a blog greatly expands your content options, allowing you to find topics and questions relevant to your potential customer base and create content to meet those needs.
#3. It can drive up website traffic.
At the most basic level, the majority of businesses want to see their marketing efforts pay off in upticks of organic traffic to their webpage, and a blog can certainly help with that. Because you’ll be using the blogs you post to establish your expertise and more specifically target your ideal customers on the topics that matter to them, you’re more likely to see more visitors.
#4. It can expand brand recognition and visibility.
If people are not aware of you and your brand and what you stand for, then it’s going to be difficult to keep your head above water, even if you have some of the best products or services around. This one goes hand in hand with our first point on expertise and authority, but regularly posting valuable, relevant content can help establish the core of your brand. Not just your logo or colors, but your business’s values and offerings.
#5. It can assist with customer lists and lead generation.
With most blogging platforms comes a function that can be a key tool in growing your business: blog subscriptions. If you’re posting consistently and offering value, visitors can input their emails and subscribe to your blog so that they’re notified of new posts. That means you now have a lead and the chance to grow your communication with them by sending them additional information, promotions, and more.
#6. It can create customer relationships and value.
We’ve mentioned “value” a few times already, but here’s where we emphasize that point. Writing regular blogs? Great. Writing regular blogs that are just a few paragraphs of nothing? Not so great. Your blogs should be offering something substantial and valuable to your visitors. Studies and white papers, for example. Advice articles. Education. Lists. Infographs. Visitors should feel like they’re being gifted free information. That, in turn, makes them more likely to stick around and build a real relationship with your company.
#7. It can give you real-time audience feedback and engagement.
If we look at something like email marketing, it can be a great tool with data that can give us a pretty decent idea of what worked and what didn’t. It doesn’t, however, open up a channel for conversation. A blog, on the other hand, does. Customers can leave comments or boost your articles on social media, giving you the opportunity to see their real-time reactions to what you’re putting out there.
#8. It can be used to share news, celebrations, new products, and more.
Obviously if something big happens for your business—you’re in a local news segment, you launch a new product or location, your CEO wins an award—you want to talk about it, promote it, all that fun stuff. Doing this on a static website is clumsy and difficult, and you won’t necessarily get the traction you’re looking for. A blog article, on the other hand, can be easily written and put up, ready to be shared across social platforms and boosted to spread the word.
#9. It can offer prime content for marketing channels.
Speaking of social platforms, most of those also like consistent posting, and that can be a challenge if you feel like you’re running out of ideas for what to put up next. Having a blog gives you consistent content that you can leverage across your channels through posts and photos and graphics. You can go back and boost older posts that resonated well with your customers to get them out there to more eyes. It’s a natural partner of the social media landscape.
So How Do You Start a Blog
Like usual, there is a little bit of groundwork you should do prior to getting your blog off the ground.
Figure out your platform.
There are a lot of blogging platform options out there, each with their own cost/benefit ratios. Depending on the code your website is built on, you might be able to implement a blog quite easily. WordPress, SquareSpace, Wix — a lot of these companies have built-in blog options that make it incredibly easy to tie your new content venture in with your current website.
Remember that design matters.
People make quick, impulse-driven decisions on the internet. If they end up on your blog page and it is confusing, hard to read, or maybe doesn’t match your other branding, they’ll dip before they read a single word of that article you just posted. Your design priority is going to be readability, so no green text on a black background or anything like that. Go for clean branding and ease of access.
Do your research.
This might, honestly, be research you already have, but like any marketing tactic, you’re going to want a strong understanding of your target audience and the demographic profiles you’re aiming for. Not only is this just a smart move overall, but it will also be the foundation for building out your content strategy. What are these ideal customers looking for? What messages speak to them? Which products and services seem to resonate with them the strongest? All of this can be fodder for future blog content.
Plan your content.
Don’t wing it.
We’re going to emphasize that one more time: Don’t wing it.
The last thing you want to do is be sitting there on a Wednesday afternoon, knowing you need to get a blog out and not having a single clue what to write about. So this is where we go back to the target audience and SEO research. They’re our starting points to get ideas for topics. From there, you’ll decide on your regular posting schedule and create a content calendar that outlines exactly what you’ll be writing about and when it will be going up on your site. Trust us, it is worth the upfront effort to avoid the dreaded scramble-and-panic later.
Share the load.
You might be thinking: I don’t know how I’m going to find the time to write blogs. We get it. That’s why we recommend making it a team effort. Having one person shoulder the entire load is going to lead to burnout. Divide up topics, divvy out responsibilities, and turn the blog into a voice for the whole company.
Blogging a Way Forward
We know how stretched small business owners are, how little wiggle room they have to spend extra money and energy trying to find marketing that works. Blogging is one of tools where you can potentially create big impact with little upfront cost and have the opportunity to see dividends well into the future.
