How Blogging Can Help Establish You As A Thought Leader

In the world we live in today, to some extent all businesses are online businesses. They have to be. If you don’t have an online presence, for all intents and purposes, you don’t exist.
One of the best ways to build that presence and start gaining attention is to set up a blog. It should be about your sector, not necessarily just about you. People want to read about things that they can use, if you can provide insight into your industry or the world of business, people will be interested. If all you write about is yourself, they won’t be. 

​Blogs should be helpful, interesting, and tackle an issue that your customers regularly face. They can be tactically filled with your key SEO terms to boost your ranking while also cementing you as a reliable presence that serves a definite purpose. Check out our other blog post if you’re wondering what SEO is.
If you get people going back to your site consistently, it will cement you as a credible source of information, and that will benefit you immeasurably.
The content itself should be engaging, focused on something that you know is of interest to your customers or others in your field. A post about how to solve a specific problem, or one that analyses an issue you regularly face will not only be interesting, it will present you as a company that understands the needs of its audience. 

Besides SEO and building credibility, blogging also allows you to directly engage with your audience via social media and sharing. If you write a blog that people find useful, they’ll share it, which is not only good for your exposure, it also doubles as an endorsement of you and your services. People are more likely to trust and use a business if it has been recommended by a friend, which is what sharing is tantamount to in the digital age.
​By presenting yourself as an expert, what you are offering your readers is your knowledge, that is the product that your blog is selling, which in turn sells your business. Making a name for yourself is difficult, but the only way to do it is to start making content that people can use. Once you’ve built up a body of work, you effectively have a large resource of free knowledge to offer you customers and visitors. This is impressive, and commands an air of authority that cannot be bought or manufactured out of thin air. 

​Lastly, it will allow you to research your own industry and gain a greater perspective of where you are in relation to your competitors. Having a deeper understanding of the field helps you understand why your business works the way it does, and how it could work better. Blogging gives you the freedom to think about your work in an abstract way, and can potentially give you an epiphany by stimulating you in ways your normal workload can’t. 

​So this Small Business Advice Week, if you don’t have a blog on your website yet, set one up today. You won’t regret it.