As a small business, an important part of your marketing strategy should be the creation of content to share with your audience on social channels.

If this content is useful, your community will more than likely freely and gladly bookmark it, download it, and pass it along to others.

In addition to people sharing your blog posts, there are a number of other reasons blogging really matters:

Better visibility.

Blogging increases the chances your business will be found. How? Because each new blog post you and your team writes creates a new indexable page. Plus, well-written and informative blog posts attract inbound links, giving your website a higher rank on search engines.

Increased credibility.

If you consistently write content that is fantastically helpful and relevant to your readers, you will start to be known as a “thought leader,” a.k.a. someone who is viewed as an authority in their field. This will help earn you trust as you work to convert blog readers into customers.

Lead generation.

Take a blog article and pair it with a piece of gated content, like an e-book where the reader has to share their name and email address to get access. This is called “lead generation” because it gives you contact information for a potential customer.

Below are a few smart things to consider when setting up your blog:

Write content that people want.

Your blog should not be about your products or even your brand. Write about the challenges that your current and potential customers face and provide solutions. Research commonly-asked questions in your industry by leveraging Google’s autocomplete or Keyword Planner and answer them in blog posts. You can also ask other departments, like sales and customer service, what they are hearing.

Include keywords in blog posts.

Understand the keywords that your prospective customers search for on the Internet and then incorporate those into blog post’s title, description, images, headers and naturally within in the content itself. Doing this will also help improve your Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a way to increase online visibility for a website. It includes fine-tuning and organizing web content for search engines in ways that they understand. Until Google can read your mind, this means including keywords.

Make your blog appealing.

Don’t throw a bunch of words on a page. Be sure to create concise paragraphs and to use images, bullets, lists, headers, and subheaders to break up the content so it’s easy for the reader to absorb. Check out other blogs that resonate with you for layout inspiration.

Blog on a regular basis.

Start with at least one post per week. Whatever cadence you choose, make sure you are consistent about it. This will help show your readers when to expect a new post and also helps you plan ahead, so you always have fresh content to share on social channels.

Visit salesforce.com to learn about our small business solutions—or learn how to build a complete social media marketing strategy by downloading this free e-book.