Business blogging is a great and relatively cheap tool to market your business. Blogs are a tool that is great for your customers, is easy to customize to match your company’s brand, and is able to easily provide information about your business and products.
If you use business blogging you will a real advantage over your competitors. Some of the benefits are:
- Word-of-Mouth. The number of readers of blogs is growing exponentially. So, by creating your own business blog you will be targeting a growing audience. If you have a great write-up about your business or your product it will quickly spread. The internet is a great way of spreading the news – the web’s word of mouth moves faster than it would in the offline world.
- Awareness and loyalty. Business blogging will give you an easily accessible and open means of communicating with your customers creating significantly more trust and loyalty.
- Feedback – Business blogging is a great way to gather your customers’ opinions. You can ask questions, and get feedback and customer concerns. So long as you are seen to act on what they say it is a wonderful way to gather this input.
- Readers are more than willing to make comments about your business and product. People want to take part in a social community and will be happy to share. You just have to take notice and act on what is said.
If you want people to visit your blog you do, of course, need to promote it. This can be done by submitting your posts to numerous business blogging directories. You need to be sure you update regularly with unique information that is not really available elsewhere. If you keep your business blogging effort current then your customers and readers will want to keep coming back for more.
You must have an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) to let readers subscribe to your blog so they are automatically notified when you make changes and new posts. When creating content you not only have to add value for your readers but you also need to make sure that the content is focused on relevant keywords. By using keywords that your readers (current and potential) are searching for you help ensure that your blog content will be highly ranked in the search engines.
When you are ready to start your business blogs there are some things you need to do:
- Blog design. Although there are lots of free templates that can be used because this is business blogging it is bet that you have it reflect your company image. You may need to use a specialist to do this for you if your design is complex but most blogging software is relatively easy to change.
- Subject matter. You need to know what you are going to write about. Business blogging should be another marketing channel, so whatever you write about needs to help meet your marketing goals. That is not to say you should constantly be trying to sell – most of your content should be giving value to your readers this means they are presold when they want to buy.
- When writing content remember:
- Be aware of any legal issues – it may be necessary to include disclaimers and to limit liability. Also, don’t attack the competition or other bloggers – this may be illegal and will certainly upset your readers.
- Avoid bombarding your readers with sales messages – they want to be entertained with interesting content.
- Keep your content up to date and accurate – don’t leave out-of-date information online. Business blogging is all about showing your customers you are an expert in your field and that they can trust your information.
- Keep all your content in line with the business standards and values.
- When you start business blogging you should write about 20 posts before you start mass marketing – this means there is content when visitors first come to the site.
- Then you can start marketing.
- Once you have started marketing you then need to monitor what is happening in terms of the number of readers, what they are commenting on, and what you are writing about.
- If, as a result of your monitoring, you identify changes in your business blogging approach then obviously you need to make those adjustments.
- Make sure your posts are consistent and reflect your business in the best possible light at all times.
- Posts should be about a wide range of topics but all part of the general topics and categories.
- You must update your business blog on a regular basis and on a frequent basis. It is recommended that you write content at least 3 times a week (more if you can) and that once you have set your schedule you stick to it.
Once you have done all these things, you can now ultimately enjoy the benefits of business blogging.
