It’s impossible to open your front door nowadays without being accosted by a blogger of some kind. Everyone seems to have a blog, from radio DJs to politicians to Joe Bloggs looking to bare his soul. “Saw Jim open his front door,” Joe will tell an expectant cyberspace when he gets home to update his masterpiece. “Slammed it shut rather hurriedly,” he might add.
But while it’s very easy to be sceptical about all the hype surrounding the blogging craze, there are very good business reasons why your new enterprise should incorporate a blog into its website.
For anyone who has resolutely stuck their fingers in their ears whenever the subject has come up, a blog is simply a regularly-updated web page where posts are usually displayed in reverse chronological order.
Personal blogs are almost like online diaries, typically discussing all aspects of the blogger’s life, while with business blogs, the subject matter generally remains consistent, with the blogger posting opinion or linking to articles in his or her field of expertise.
An expert in your field
And it is this credibility or authority conveyed by “expert status” that is one of the principal benefits associated with running a business blog. For instance, suppose you’ve just launched your own public relations company, the blog on your site might discuss recent developments in the industry, commenting on strong campaigns, controversial incidents etc.
Becoming known as a commentator on your industry will open up consulting opportunities and speaking engagements and will also develop your contacts network, as other bloggers in your niche link to your posts and add their own comments.
Building your brand
This interaction with the reader that is a popular (though not compulsory) aspect of most blogs can also be leveraged as a highly effective communication channel with your customers. You might post to your blog some options for new products and services and ask your customers to comment with their suggestions. Highly qualified customer feedback like this is often hard to come by through other sources.
Blogs are also an excellent source of traffic for your website. The problem with many small business websites, particularly brochure sites, is that the content tends not to change very often. This discourages search engines like Google from visiting your site regularly and can affect how high your site ranks it its search results.
Because blogs are text based, and generate regular fresh content, usually containing plenty of links, they can rank very well in search results, sending you thousands of free visitors. You can maximise your potential to turn these visitors into customers by prominently linking to your products and services from your blog page.
You can set up a blog very quickly and cheaply using a number of popular blogging platforms. Services like wordpress.com and blogger.com allow you to set up a blog for free and host it on their servers. Your blog address will be something like yourblog.blogger.com. You can then link to this hosted blog from your main website.
However, for a business blog, it is worth your while opting for a paid solution hosted on your own domain name and your own web space. Wordpress.org is probably the most popular option.
Your blog address will then be something like www.yoursite.com/blog.
Or, if you don’t have a website at all, it’s often wise to make your entire site a blog. There are hundreds of high-quality blog themes available that can help you construct the perfect blog site for your business.
And a blog is also a Content Management System (CMS), meaning it is extremely easy to update. So forget calling your web designer whenever you need to make a change to your site.
