An Opportunity There for the Taking

We’re at a turning point. More and more people are going online to search for good local businesses (in a YouGov survey commissioned by WeLoveLocal earlier this year, 51% of people said that they used the Internet most to find local businesses), yet very few small businesses have anything more than a simple, static web page to promote themselves.

This leaves the door wide open for savvy business owners like us to get ahead (assuming we’re prepared to do just a little bit better).

Get Ahead and Stay Ahead

The idea is simple: if you run a small local business, the chances are that most of your small competitors don’t have much of an online presence. If you can establish a stronger online presence than your competitors, then it’ll be your business that local people tend to find when they search online.

The more people who find you, the more likely your business is to be mentioned elsewhere on the web, thus building your presence further. With a greater online presence, more people will find you in the future. You’ll thus get more mentions. And so on. With a bit of work, this virtuous circle can, over time, establish your business as the reference for your particular type of business in the local area.

Why a Static Website is Not Enough

Fair enough, you’re thinking. That sounds reasonable, but how do I actually build my business’s online presence? That’s where a blog comes in. Standard websites can be expensive and time-consuming to update, so most small businesses can’t afford to update them very often. That leaves them with static websites that are, frankly, a bit dull and lifeless. People aren’t usually keen to link to dull, lifeless websites.

Why Blogs are Better

A blog is different. Think of a blog like a website that is really easy to add content to. All you need to do is write the content and click a button to publish it. Simple. (You still have to spend time to write new content on a regular basis, mind you, but there are ways you can learn to come up with lots of good ideas for easy-to-write posts. More of that in later articles.)

Advantages of blogs:

1. They’re free!*
2. Easy to set up yourself
3. Quick and easy to update yourself
4. Plenty of free templates available to make them look good
5. People like to link to them
6. You can write informally
7. They’re a way for customers to get to know you

* Later you may want to pay for more advanced features such as hosting under your own domain name.

Blogging Your Way to More Business

Once you’ve got your blog up and running and have a few posts under your belt, you’ll need to market it. Fortunately, given that very few local businesses are probably writing blogs, this won’t be too hard (again, more on this in later articles).

Before long, you’ll have a few links to your blog. Seeing these links, Google will start considering your blog as a good reference and will start showing your site more prominently in the search results. A more prominent listing means more potential customers finding you. You’re on your way!

Further Resources

A couple of free blogging services are Blogger (very easy to use) and WordPress (perhaps slightly more complicated, but with lots of features).

photo credit: ~ A????