business communication

Business blogging is a great and relatively cheap tool to market your business. Blogs are a tool that is great for your customers, is easy to customize to match your company’s brand, and is able to easily provide information about your business and products.

If you use business blogging you will a real advantage over your competitors. Some of the benefits are:

• Word-of-Mouth. The number of readers of blogs is growing exponentially. So, by creating your own business blog you will be targeting a growing audience. If you have a great write up about your business or your product it will quickly spread. The internet is a great way for spreading news – the web’s word of mouth moves faster than it would in the offline world.

• Awareness and loyalty. Business blogging will give you an easily accessible and open means of communicating with your customers creates significantly more trust and loyalty.

• Feedback – Business blogging is a great way to gather your customers’ opinion. You can ask questions, get feedback and customer concerns. So long as you are seen to act on what they say it is a wonderful way to gather this input.

• Readers are more than willing to make comments about your business and product. People want to take part in a social community and will be happy to share. You just have to take notice and act on what is said.

If you want people to visit your blog you do, of course, need to promote it. This can be done by submitting your posts to the numerous business blogging directories. You need to be sure you update regularly with unique information that is not really available elsewhere.

If you keep your business blogging effort current then your customers and readers will want to keep coming back for more.

You must have an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) to let readers subscribe to your blog so they are automatically notified when you make changes and new posts. When creating content you not only have to add value for your readers but you also need to make sure that the content is focused around relevant keywords. By using keywords that your readers (current and potential) are searching for you help ensure that your blog content will be highly ranked in the search engines.

When you are ready to start your business blogs there are some things you need to do:

1. Blog design. Although there are lots of free templates that can be used because this is business blogging it is bet that you have it reflect your company image. You may need to use a specialist to do this for you if you design is complex but most blogging software is relatively easy to change.

2. Subject matter. You need to know what you are going to write about. Business blogging should be another marketing channel, so whatever you write about needs to help meet your marketing goals. That is not to say you should constantly be trying to sell – most of you content should be giving value to your readers this means they are presold when they want to buy.

3. When writing content remember:

• Be aware of any legal issues – it may be necessary to include disclaimers and to limit liability. Also, don’t attack the competition or other bloggers – this maybe illegal and will certainly upset your readers.

• Avoid bombarding your readers with sales messages – they want to be entertained with interesting content.

• Keep your content up to date and accurate – don’t leave out of date information online. Business blogging is all about showing your customers you are an expert in your field and they can trust your information.

• Keep all your content in line with the business standards and values.

4. When you start business blogging you should write about 20 posts before you start mass marketing – this means there is content when visitors first come to the site.

5. Then you can start marketing.

6. Once you have started marketing you then need to monitor what is happening in terms of the number of readers, what they are commenting on and what you are writing about.

7. If, as a result of your monitoring, you identify changes in your business blogging approach then obviously you need to make those adjustments.

8. Make sure your posts are consistent and reflect your business in the best possible light at all times.

9. Posts should be about a wide range of topics but all part of the general topics and categories.

10. You must update your business blog on a regular basis and on a frequent basis. It is recommended that you write content at least 3 times a week (more if you can) and that once you have set your schedule you stick to it.

Once you have done all these things, you can now ultimately enjoy the benefits of business blogging.

For anyone who is new to business blogging, the whole process can be a mix of particular interest and excitement with caution and confusion.

With there being a lot of press recently about the benefits of business blogging, there’s no doubt that developing and implementing an effective strategy will work – which is where the interest and excitement comes in – but when you consider business blogging is, in essence, nothing more than publishing words for people to read, it’s understandable why some people are cautious and confused over how it can be beneficial to any business.

The most important point to note here if you’re in this boat is that first and foremost, business blogging is so much more than simply a few words on a page that are uploaded to a public area for people to read and it can act as almost every type of marketing tool that you can utilize.

It can increase brand awareness among your target audience.

It can encourage communication with your customers, past, present and potential.

It can act as a platform to deliver new products and services to a ready and waiting group of people.

And in its most basic form, it allows you to stay in touch with your customers, the people who keep your organization afloat.

Once you realise these facts – that business blogs can, in essence, be whatever you want them to be – the amount of caution naturally deteriorates.

The level of confusion, however, doesn’t often follow suit as much – although a lot of organization’s come round to the understanding of just how beneficial business blogs can be, they struggle to fully understand how they get visitors to their blog to read the content.

Of course, if you’ve hired a business blogging agency and they’re delivering a promotional service as part of the blogging strategy, you shouldn’t have to worry too much about visitors, as the business blogging agency will look after this aspect.

Should you be blogging yourself or you want to give the efforts of your business blogging agency an extra push, the best way to encourage visitors to your blog is to think of it as if it were a retail outlet and apply the same marketing principles as you would there.

1. Place an advert where your target audience are going to see it

A fantastic way to give a kick start to any traffic is to place an advert in a high profile area where your target audience are going to see it.

Online is ideally the route you want to take here, as the time taken to be on one page, seeing an advert, clicking on it and visiting your business blog is a matter of seconds and it’s strongly advised that you carry out some prior research to ensure that your advert is going to be in the most suitable place possible.

2. Rely on passing traffic

Although it’s not a great way to get more and more visitors to your blog quickly, just like a retail outlet on a busy high street would, your business blog will gain visitors naturally as long as fresh, quality and unique content continues to be provided on a regular basis.

Therefore, if you’re wanting to increase your business blog’s traffic, as a minimum you simply have to ensure that appealing content is uploaded regularly – do this and traffic will naturally increase slowly but steadily.

3. Spread the word verbally

Just because the internet has opened up a whole new world of advertising, it doesn’t mean that the old techniques are now redundant and there aren’t many better ways to get visitors to your business blog than word of mouth.

It might seem like a basic way of promotion, but if you were to tell 100 of your colleagues or business contacts about your new business blog and each of those told 10 people each, that’s 1,000 people instantly aware of your business blog, completely for free.

4. Get the blog’s name known

When you look at the different ways that a blog or website can receive traffic, there are three main sources.

Referrals relate to those visitors who come from another website via a link or an advert; organic are those visitors who visit the website after inputting a phrase into a search engine and clicking on the results and direct traffic covers those visitors who have typed the blog’s URL into the address bar.

In an ideal world, you would want a somewhat equal mix of all three traffic sources, rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket and relying on a single traffic source.

Referral and organic traffic is increased and sustained through, among other aspects, search engine optimization, but direct traffic relies on people knowing and remembering the blog’s name and URL.

And it’s because of this why it’s strongly advised that you invest some time into raising brand awareness.

Whether you hire an agency to do it for you or you take the time out to raise your brand awareness amongst your target audience is irrelevant – the most important fact is ensuring that as many people as possible not only know your business blog’s name, but it’s URL and if it’s not immediately obvious, which organization the business blog is linked to.

Blogging for business is a process that is fast becoming one of the most must-have techniques and resources that a business can utilize, due largely to its expansive range of benefits.

It can be difficult to know how exactly to start blogging, however and even more difficult to know how to start bringing visitors in.

What needs to be understood is that although the blog will naturally grow in every respect by itself, you can rapidly further its development and increase its reader base by implementing a number of techniques, as explained here, all of which should see the number of visitors to your business blog grow substantially, helping tremendously with its continued success.