I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about the growing number of small businesses using blogging as a tool. The Wall Street Journal has a great article on the use of blogs by small businesses for improving sales.
Most owners use blogs — which are easy to set up and require little technical savvy — to drive people to their company Web site. But entrepreneurs also use them to get consumer feedback or answer commonly asked questions. And some blogs serve as stand-ins for Web sites as a way to describe what a business does.
One of the points they make is that blogs can be a great tool to increase traffic to a small business web site. Small businesses often don’t even get enough traffic to show up on a Google search of the company name.
To see how a blog can change that go to Google and type in the following terms: “Jeff Cornwall”, “Entrepreneurial”, “Entrepreneurship Blogs.” My site almost always pops up near the top on the first two searches, and I am usually on page one with the last one. I haven’t had to pay anyone to optimize searches for these terms — it has come from the traffic at the blog. A blog can be a great way to bootstrap increased traffic to a website.