6 Helpful Tips for Business Blogging

Published: April 29 2009

Blogs are an excellent way to communicate to your audience and they are also a great way to add loads of search engine friendly content to your website. Having a blog for your business; however, can be also be a headache. You need to research the pros and cons of blogging before investing your marketing dollars and time on this potential component of your website.

Here are some tips to help you determine whether a blog is right for you and your business and help you maximize the success of your blog.

1. As with any type of marketing initiative, you need goals. Goals help keep you focused. At the end of the day you should be able to look at the time, energy and money invested and be able to measure the results. Make sure your goals are realistic. It's unlikely that a blog will single-handedly increase sales or revenue, but it may help.
2. What underlying message do you want you audience to receive from reading your blog posts?
3. Choose a solution that meets the needs of you and your business. There are plenty of options for blog software to choose from. These include everything from paying someone to customize you blog to free open-source solutions. Research these options carefully, check-out online reviews. What may seem like a dream solution for getting a blog started may turn into a complete nightmare in six months after you have invested significant time.
4. Make sure you have a good writer. This one is obvious, you need someone who enjoys writing (perhaps yourself) and can edit properly. You will need to write a lot, as once you develop an audience, they expect to see your blog frequently updated. An added benefit to having a frequently updated blog is that it helps you with your search engine positioning. This helps grow your audience, which in turn will want more frequent updates.
5. Decide how you want to interact with your audience. Will you allow comments (negative or positive) to what you have to say? Or is it easier to say what you need to say and not deal with comments? Comments are a great way to add content to your site, but depending on the solution you choose they are also an easy way for spammers and hackers to get in and disrupt your blog.
6. Finally, be consistent both in how often you write and what you write about; stay focused on the goals you have to achieve through your blog and measure results.
    

Contact us if you have any questions or require any further information about blogs.