Value of a Blog
Blogging seems to be all the rage now. Many of these are
personal blogs, where people just give their opinions on various
topics. Others, however, are business blogs. Blogs can let more
people find your site, as there will be more content for the
search engines to pick up on. And they will be more likely to
stick around, as you have interesting content.
The first thing you will need to do is pick someone to write
your business blog. It needs to be someone who writes well and
knows about your business. In some cases, those may not be the
same person. Often, in very small businesses, the owner is the
only employee. If that is you, it's possible that while you
don't write extremely well, you do know a lot about your
business. If that is the case, you might try a system where
someone else proofreads your blog and corrects and slightly
rephrases things where they could be improved.
The next think you will need to decide on is what your subject
matter will be about. In some types of businesses, it is
appropriate for the blog to be slightly more personal in nature.
If you are marketing to high school and/or college students,
they would be more interested in local events than they would in
the details behind your latest business partnership.
Another option is to blog to keep clients and others updated on
where you are in various projects or what inventory you've
gotten in. For a golf store, you might keep your clients up to
date on when you're expecting a new line of golf clubs.
A third option is like my own blog, where you give advice that
will help others, regardless of whether they are your
clients/customers or not. On my blog, I try to make sure that
you don't have to have a lot of technical expertise to use my
advice. I don't blog about how to write HTML. Instead, I blog
about the types of features you can have on a site and whether
it would be to your advantage to use those features. It's
general advice that can be applied to websites whether the
reader has a working knowledge of HTML or pays someone else to
do that.
I've found that my blog (and it's accompanying monthly printed
newsletter that's basically the "best of" the blog entries from
the previous month) seems to increase my perceived credibility
and my approachability. And to get new clients and customers in
the door, perceived credibility and approachability is what you
need. To keep them, you will need actual credibility and good
communication, so hopefully you have both.
You can also publish your blog entries to sites like
ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com and include a link to your
site, which is what I do. Then other sites will also publish
your articles, but they have to include those links to your site
also.
Personally, I post on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I think that any
less frequently would be a waste of time. And remember, in
addition to making sure the entries will pull in new visitors
from search engines, also make sure the article is useful to
them. If you are a good writer and write on the types of
subjects you mentioned, you'll do well.