Most people have heard of blogging; lots do it. But plenty of businesses don’t realise just how useful a regularly updated blog can be, and now I can help.
So why blog? What benefits will it have to your business? Well to start with, blogging for business is great for improving your search engine ranking. Updating the content regularly means the spiders keep visiting; they know your site is active and that improves your position in the rankings. You can also include plenty of important keywords in your blog posts to improve your position when people search for the services you offer. For example, this article is all about blogging for business; by including a few mentions of it and including “blogging for business” in the URL, it’s likely to score highly when people search for that term.
OK, so keeping an updated blog can improve your search engine ranking which pulls visitors in to your website – and blogging can also keep them coming back. Everyone coming to your site is a potential customer but they may not yet be ready to buy what you offer. If your website is static and nothing ever changes, they aren’t likely to come back again. If you have an informative and entertaining yet educative blog that they can take something from (Lord Reith was talking a lot of sense!) then they are more likely to bookmark you and come back regularly, or perhaps subscribe to your RSS feed so they can see when you update. The more they visit your website, the more they’ll get to know and trust you and the greater the likelihood that it’ll be YOU they do business with when they want what you’re offering.
Of course, the other advantage of blogging for business is that you can engage with your customers in a way that static websites can’t. You can use your blog to introduce new products and services; talk about interesting projects you’ve worked on; give people a glimpse of the person behind the business; or comment on an interesting and relevant news story. Blogging gives your visitors the opportunity to comment and that opens up a conversation between you both, which helps the relationship develop even faster!
Blogging also helps you link up your website with any other social media marketing you’re doing. For example, when you blog you can announce it to the world via your Twitter or Facebook account and that will pull people into your website. You can use your blog articles in your e-newsletter. You can even post your blog articles on other websites, for example 4Networking or Ezine Articles, and that will increase visitors too.
So you can see why blogging for business can be really useful; but what if you don’t have a blog set up and don’t know where to start, or don’t have the time or the inclination to keep one? That’s where I come in. I now offer a couple of blogging packages aimed at small businesses. One provides you with a series of articles you can use on an existing blog; the other includes complete setup and maintenance, as well as regular articles posted on your behalf.
Blogging for business is a great way to promote your company, attract new website visitors and engage with your customers. If you’re not doing it already, why not?!
Excellent post Alison, I always approve of a blog post that promotes the usefulness of blogging.
If any readers haven’t got a blog, now’s the time to get one. For example, I am organising an event for a client, so I asked him how was he going to publicise it and let his prospective customers know what was happening, what was its purpose and how successful his event was after it had happened.
All these things can be expressed in a blog. It is a community hub for your customers, past, present and future, to keep in touch with your business, learn what’s going on and any new ventures, understand your business far more succinctly than what’s on your website, interact with you through comments and feedback, subscribe to be the first to know when you next post – and what’s really clever, every time your blog is updated your new post automatically publishes itself in all the social networking sites you have set up, simultaneously. Brilliant – and suddenly there’s a brand new audience at your fingertips!
Thanks. I really am surprised at the number of businesses who don’t even have websites yet, never mind a blog! One day they might move into the digital age.
wow…. sounds pretty good.
Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he actually bought me lunch because I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that: Thanks for lunch!