Why Blog for Business
Along with social networking, blogging has become one of the strongest moves you can make in helping your business continue to grow and gain audience. There are several reasons for this.
Content
You have your business website online. Maybe it’s got five to ten pages that sufficiently describes your business/products/services. Let’s say you add two to three blog posts a week. By the end of the year your website now has over 100 pages of relevant content for the search engines to take in. That’s not bad.
Social Networking
As I mentioned at the beginning, social networking is another activity that you can’t afford to not take advantage of. The great thing is that it’s possible to connect your blog to your social networking sites so that when you post a new article on your blog, it can automatically be posted on your Facebook wall, “tweeted” from your Twitter account and show up on your LinkedIn news feed all with the click of one button! How cool is that? Although you should be honing your social networking chops and putting the time in on these sites, I know that many of my clients have said that they just don’t have the time (or the interest in some cases – I’m still working on those) to spend on those sites. At least this way they can still have a presence on those sites and add content through their blog posts.
The Personal Touch
No matter how big your business is, people (your potential customers) want to know you do care about their needs. Make your blog personal – conversational. Address concerns that customers are talking about. Get their feedback. Even big businesses are seeing the how effective this is. Tonight I saw a Dominos Pizza commercial that featured their CEO showing a photo of a bad looking pizza (is there really such a thing?) and saying he was upset by the image of that pizza and they would not sell you such a pie.
Be personable; be yourself; write about what you know and things you can help others with; keep things reasonably short and you’ll do fine. Blogging is a powerful form of online marketing and with many marketing budgets being cut these days, this is a way for you to continue to be highly effective at delivering your message to the masses for only the cost of your time and effort.
