Should sole traders blog?

Getting online can still be tough for small firms and today in Nottingham it really came home to me. A few of us were talking about the potential of a web presence to really give a lift to micro-businesses. Along the way I got bombarded with questions about practicalities and details of website development ranging from hosting and blogging to email management and ecommerce ordering. But among them one question really stood out: Should small businesses blog? It came from a one person business trying to make sense of how to draw all these ideas together. It's a big question - and the answer?...

(I put together some simple steps for small businesses getting online that you can download for free if you like, and if you’d like to see my suggestions for small firms getting online then they’re in one of Digital’s Classrooms)

Yes, yes, and yes again! There’s probably more argument for the sole trader to blog than any other type of firm. It’s fast, simple, valuable, and introduces you as the face of your company, the person your prospective clients will be working with. Okay, so it may take some practice to get into the swing of it, and you may even need a little extra support from friends or family when it comes to developing your voice and your pages, but it’s a phenomenally powerful tool and one every sole trader should explore.

It also gets sole traders over one of their biggest problems: small businesses just don’t scale well - let’s face it, when the chief executive is also the chief envelope-stuffer, bookkeeper and salesman, there’s a lot competing for every hour of your day. Classic marketing is typically campaign driven: a burst of energy to produce marketing messages that are distributed and then lost. This perishability of classic marketing always struck me as a massive waste; yet not so in blogging. Perishability gets replaced with permanence. Your marketing builds over time into layers rather than replacing what went before. And a weblog let’s you scale; always being there even when you can’t actually be there.

For a sole trader, a blog could work like a magazine column, packaging up bite-sized chunks of information, giving enough information to deliver value, but holding back from publishing everything. This replaces the idea of small corporate websites as being the brochure-ware of the late nineties, with sites as a reference point of real value. It’s now one of the easiest forms of marketing and really builds into a resource over time. I just wish more small businesses realised just how easy it can be.