The importance of blogging for your business
Last week I explained how
important it was to become involved in your local communities by being
enlightened entrepreneurs. Your email newsletters can be powerful tools
in creating awareness for your favorite charity or non-profit
organization. Once you begin to hire employees, your company can create
a matched giving policy where you can encourage your employees to
donate to your business’s charity.
Today, I’m going to talk
about the importance of blogging for your business. As part of your
organized online marketing campaigns, blogging can be a very efficient
and inexpensive way to reach your customers on a more personal level.
In the past few years, blogging has become a legitimate and even
respected medium to reach the public. While your email newsletters
should talk about the products or services your company offers, blog
posts can serve a variety of other important functions.
Blogging is often more casual
in its word usage and is more story-based in its content. However, by
maintaining a professional and accurate blog about your company, you
can become a trusted expert in your field, and help your customers and
other industry professional put a face to your business. Blogs also
allow you to engage in an open forum directly with your customers,
which can be a valuable way of obtaining feedback about your business.
A major upside to blogging is
that it can dramatically improve your search engine rankings. The more
blog posts you write and the more your customers comment on your posts,
the more opportunities there are for search engines to pick up your
content. Through our company iContact, we have created an online
customer forum called the
iContact Community. Our customers can post content
to their blogs, and their customers or other members of the iContact
Community can vote and comment on their content. Through our Community,
our customers get their content indexed on Google and other search
engines. StartupNation also has a fantastic Community, as well as
several running blogs about a variety of business-related topics.
Thank you for reading, and I’ll be back at the end of the week with more email marketing advice.
Cheers,
Ryan Allis
April 9th, 2008 at 11:38 am
I love blogging - now I am a writer so this suits me well. But I love that we have a static web page that allows people to go on and read about WHAT we DO and WHAT we OFFER (http://www.1429creative.com), but when I blog, I feel like I get to invite people into the WHO we ARE. I feel like this breaks down the TRUST barrier that exists naturally between any CLIENT/COACH. I love to give people an insight into my personality, too.
In addition, I like have a separate site that I can update daily with tips and ideas - using a WordPress blog myself, I find it very easy to update each day (or so) that I do it. I’m not sure it’s that convenient to update my website everyday.
Plus, there are SEO advantages of having an additional site that links to my company’s website - I can’t explain them but others can and I trust the numerous voices who tell me so.
So there are so many good reasons to blog!
Thanks for the post!
April 10th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I agree about blogging as a business building tool. I love the flexibility of it, and often can’t wait to put my $0.02 in on a topic that is being discussed in the industry or that happens to catch my eye. My blog entries often end up as being the ’seedling’ for later newsletter topics, articles, speeches - or even entire workshops!
Randy is spot-on, too, when it comes to utilizing your blog to give potential coachees insight into your personality. People have to feel you are on the same/a similar wavelenth to be willing to give you the kind of ‘trust advance’ that you need to get a good coaching relationship off on the right foot. My blogging (btw: I use Wordpress, too, Randy - http://www.creating-tomottow.com/blog) let’s them get to ‘know’ me on neutral ground for as long as they need - and I’ve found that if potential clients know my blog, the distance between us on initial real-life contact is noticably smaller.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Somebody please comment on my ideas below, I am just toying with concepts here:
Concept:
A blog is a bunch of people who are interested enough to read or actually share their ideas on a particular topic, not necessarily interested in your business or your industry.
If a marketers objective is the build community of people who are willing to give your company permission to have dialogue with them on a regular basis and hopefully do business with them in the future, then it is the marketers objective not to start a blog about their company but rather a blog(s) about the ‘hot topics’ that the members of their target market (community) are genuinely interested in.
Take for example my company (we don’t have blog yet), we provide video conferencing equipment and training to get people to use it effectively so they can reach more stakeholders and get all the benefits of not spending half your working life in an aircraft. If we started a blog about our company I don’t think we would get much of a readership (maybe some from the other directors), however if we started a blog for say the K-12 education community which connected teachers which use video conferencing I have no doubt we could not stop them talking about what they are interested in (teaching on video conference) and our company could add in its $0.02 worth as well. Now with this model of a ‘blog topic focused on the target communities interests’, we would have started to develop sustainable relationship with our target community (I suppose the next step is to work out how to make them sustainably profitable relationship…..TBA)
I suppose what I am saying is a blog that really engages your target community should really just be a platform which enables the members of the community to engage each other..
Please comment on the above
April 11th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Ryan, Just a few questions about blogging.
1)Is it better to have a blog build within your companies website or a entirely separate URL website for the blog?
2)Is it better for SEO to have a blog for each "product" keyword that consumers would be searching for or just one blog for all of them?
3)Is it just as good to use blooger.com or should a companies invest in somekind of software for their server to create the blogs. Is one better than the other for SEO.
Thanks and love the topic.
April 12th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been blogging for over 3 years now, and my blog continues to be one of the top 3 referrers to my website. I routinely get orders from people who indicate they’ve found me through my blog, and have developed a following in the craft community where my product base is.
I’m constantly amazed at the number of people who are still not using this inexpensive and all-encompassing way of reaching beyond your core audience to find new customers and clients.
Interestingly, most of the time I blog off topic (i.e. not related to my business, but what’s going on in my life), and those are my highest readership days.
Further note: I started with Blogger but changed to Typepad a couple of years ago. I find Typepad easy to use, easy to configure and personalize, and has none of the glitches that Blogger possesses (and it is possessed!).
Carrie Sommer
http://www.sommerdesigns.typepad.com
http://www.sommerdesigns.com
January 29th, 2012 at 7:50 am
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