There’s no doubt that blogging for business can be a valuable contribution to your marketing activities. A business blog gives your targeted audience, customers, potential partners and even employees easy access to news and information about your business, products and services. You can share policy changes, product information, new releases, discount vouchers, behind the scenes insider information and more. You can add video, audio, and other custom elements to make your blog truly reflect your business’s brand.
Blogs can be very quick to start, in fact you can get up and running in a matter of minutes. WordPress is easy to learn, easy to customize and a great way to create a dynamic online presence without a lot of technical knowledge.
One of the biggest benefits of blogging is that Google and other search engines love blogs; the frequently updated content and the opportunities for your readers to link and share your content can lead to high search engine rankings. Regular updates to your blog will keep your website visitors returning more frequently and staying longer once they find your site.
Your blog can also help you build a relationship, or strengthen a relationship with your customers, prospects and website visitors through greater interactivity and two-way communication. Visitors to your blog will be able to quickly and easily share their comments and suggestions with you, which will help you better understand your customers and respond to their comments.
And if you don’t have enough time to write regularly, there are many ways you can speed this process up, such as using video or audio, using guest bloggers or ghostwriters, or buying PLR content.
With so many potential benefits to blogging for business it’s important to know exactly what you want your blog to do for your business. I’ve met people at small business networking events who, when they find out I have business blogs say, “Fantastic, I need to start a business blog, how do I do it?”
“Great! What do you want your blog to do for your business?” I reply.
“Er…I don’t know, it’s just everyone says I need one and everyone else seems to have one already!”
There are tons of experts out there telling you how important blogging is, but most seem to focus on how to write well, how to engage readers, how to get comments and how to make money. This is all part of the job of a blogger, but it’s far from the whole picture. The part of the picture that you rarely see is the strategic side of blogging.
Without a clear goal and a strategy to reach it, your blog will end up as a random selection of posts that aren’t working for your business. With millions of blogs now available on the web, you need to be very clear about who your blog is for, what they want from you and how you can best reach them. This also applies if you have a blog which isn’t gaining much traction, or one that’s run out of steam. Getting really clear on the aims of your blog could dramatically improve the results you get from it.
If you’re struggling to define the aim of your blog, look at the aim of your business as a whole. How could your blog help support that aim? For example, if you’re a web designer, your goal may be to make websites that not only look great, but that are reliable and meet your clients’ objectives. Your blog could help you by demonstrating your expertise or educating your clients to market their websites.
Depending on the goal, a web designer could post a number of different types of blog content, from ‘how to’ articles and tutorials, to case studies of clients he or she has worked with or examples of great web design. But different web designers will have different clients and therefor different goals for their blogs.
Then, you can break this down into a series of goals, such as gain 100 new mailing list subscribers each month or publish a new blog post twice a week. And finally you can begin creating content!
If you’re a web designer or blog about WordPress for beginners, don’t forget to grab my pack of free WordPress PLR articles here.
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