I don’t have time. I don’t have anything to write about. I’m not a good writer. No one would really read it anyway.

Stop the excuses. Stop the hand wringing. Stop the over-thinking. Your small business  needs to be blogging, and if you’re not, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to reap benefits from organic search engine optimization, social media and client good will.

You probably know the reasons you should blog, so let’s just hit the Cliff’s Notes version: it fills your site with useful keywords for search engines used in a natural way. It gives you great content to share on social media which helps drive traffic to your site. And it helps establish you as an expert among clients and prospects.

So why aren’t you doing it? It probably falls into one of two categories: you’re lazy or you’re afraid.

If it’s laziness, let me share some statistics that might spur you forward. We recently started ghost blogging for a small business. They’d never posted a blog on their website–ever. Simply by creating a blog post with great organic keywords and sharing it on social media netted them their best single day traffic numbers in the history of the site. We’ve had other clients triple their submission rates on contact us and other submission forms.

If it’s fear–fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of writing, that’s a harder nut to crack. But please refer back to the title: just blog, dammit. What’s the worst that can happen? If no one reads it, you’re just out a little time (and you need to rethink your strategy). If everyone hates it and attacks you for it, hey, you’re getting attention, creating conversation. There’s value there. If your writing isn’t any good, how will you ever improve it if you don’t just write? If you just need guidance, there are lots of great free resources out there, or you can pay for personalized help to steer you in the right direction.

Whatever your business, it can benefit from blogging. So stop making excuses and blog, dammit.