Setting up and maintaining a blog related to your small business is an excellent (and cheap!) way to attract potential clients or customers. As time goes by, if your blog is maintained regularly and updated with relevant content, it can become a regular, periodic destination for existing clients and customers as well. When I was a solo practitioner, maintaining a regularly updated blog helped me land multiple clients.
Attracting New Clients and Customers
If you are looking to grow your business, or just starting out, your blog can be an excellent source of new leads and customers. When I maintained a blog, it was you to attract new clients to my law firm, where I was a solo practitioner. I found it helpful to remember that potential clients would be looking for different information than existing clients.
For example, a new client would be more interested in knowing how much their legal problem was going to cost and what sort of information they would need at an initial consultation. If your blog is intended to attract new customers, someone who has not purchased your product before may be interested in simple facts, pricing and other information about switching from another product to yours.
Keeping Current Clients and Customers
My blog was used by current clients to keep tabs on changes in the law or in the industry in which they operate. Your current customers, especially if you provide a service or product that is used time and time again, can become a destination for them to get current information and keep up-to-date. By becoming an ongoing resource, you can be sure that you or your company will be thought of first when they make purchasing decisions in the future.
It is also helpful to develop, as part of your blog, an area that can't track customer balances, purchasing history or other details regarding their particular account. This may cost a bit and require professional assistance, but it can provide a return on investment. Not only can this become a resource that your customers use to manage their own business, it will also increase the incentive that would be necessary for those customers to look elsewhere for their products or services.
Relevant Information
Especially in the context of keeping your current clients and customers apprised of industry developments, the information you provide must be current and relevant. This may seem obvious, but stop and think about how many sites you have visited more than once over a few weeks only to see the information provided always the same. You probably didn ' t go back.
Of course, evergreen content, or content that does not change over time, can be useful and informative. But it won't keep your clients and customers coming back a regular basis. By providing recent developments with a spin from your expertise, you can for sure that your product or service will be something that visitors to your blog think about on a frequent, regular basis.
*Note: This was written by a Yahoo! contributor. Do you have a small business story that you'd like to share? Sign up with the Yahoo! Contributor Network to start publishing your own finance articles.
