What’s a Blog?
The term “blog” is the shortened and popular vernacular for the term “Weblog”. In their infancy, Weblogs were simple online diaries used for tasks like sharing an individual’s vacation experiences with a small circle of friends.
When politicians, sports stars and entertainment personalities started publishing blogs; they became high traffic, high interest Web destinations. This in turn motivated the creation of numerous new blogs intended for general rather than private consumption. Blogs offer the opportunity for readers to offer their comments which inspire comments on comments turning many blog sites into mini online communities.
The overall popularity of blogs has skyrocketed. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek article estimated the total number of active blogs worldwide at 18.7 million generating over 4 million new postings daily. Readers of these blogs are estimated in the hundreds of millions. Nearly half of these blogs are English-language sites.
Most popular blog publishing tools allow readers to “subscribe” to blogs of interest and receive new postings and comments automatically via RSS feeds or E-mail. The proactive outreach and interactive idea exchange blogs offer has created a massive and active “blogosphere” that continues to grow in interest and participation.
Business Blogging
Any communication vehicle this popular wasn’t going to be ignored by businesses; many, many of which are now active participants in the blogosphere. A good indicator of the interest businesses have in blogging is the results of a book search on Amazon.com for “business blogging” which returns over 1,800 available titles. Blogs offer businesses a method of transferring information to their customers and prospects in a form and level of detail unavailable in any other media form. Many businesses have multiple bogs with some, often called micro-blogs, focusing on niche subject matter.
Should Your Business Have a Blog?
The answer is very likely “yes” if you’re willing to devote the necessary time to make recurring postings and respond as necessary to reader comments. At a bare minimum, this would require making two new postings per month. More, of course, would be better. Optimum would be five or more postings a week. Since many postings are short (a paragraph or two is not untypical), the time requirement is not huge. A blog is generally inexpensive to set-up.
Return on Investment
Even if the effort and expense is not large, what return benefit can be expected? A good question. Let’s list a few:
- Sales Promotion: If you sell products or services, you’ll certainly want to blog about them and link from your post directly to your associated “buy now” page.
- Brand Building: Your business branding is, of course, important and a blog will help build and reinforce it. Business blogs give you the chance to share your expertise and knowledge with a larger audience. An opportunity to connect with a wider audience and build a community is a particularly strong benefit for vendors of technical or complex products, consulting firms and knowledge workers.
- Relationship Building: A blog enables you to speak more freely and in a more conversational style than your Web site and other promotional materials do. Your readers will soon feel like they “know” your blogs author or authors. The more they know, like and trust your business the more likely they are to seek out your products or services.
- Appear Authoritative: Your blog will, of course, frequently deal with areas where you’re an expert. This appearance of authority is an important businesses builder. Prospects will be much more likely to use the products or services of those they see as an authority on key subjects. Give your views on the latest business trends and events, offer reviews, pass on tips, talk about your upcoming engagements and their objectives, cite examples from your customers or clients’ recent successes, etc. In short, do anything, within reason, that makes you look like an authority on your subject matter areas.
- Appear Accessible: It doesn’t matter whether you are not, but you will appear to be more accessible especially if you allow freedom for all your blog visitors to post comments. A blog makes you more “approachable” with a minimal incremental time commitment to review and approve site visitor comments.
- Competitive Differentiation: There’s certainly no shortage of competitors. A blog provides an excellent vehicle to allow your potential customers or clients to understand your expertise and passions.
- Gain Insight Into Your Constituency: A business blog enables you to gain insight into your current and potential customers or clients. From the comments they leave on your posts, you get a sense of how the outside world reacts to what you say.
- Generate Website Traffic: Blogs typically quickly build up large amount of textual content both from your postings and your readers’ comments. Much of this text is specific to your offered products or services with frequent references to industry terms. As the search engine spiders crawl and index this material it generates hundreds or even thousands of different and valuable searchable keywords bringing free traffic to your Website. Search engines have an affinity for blogs because they offer a large amount of content that is updated and added to on a regular basis.
Additionally, blogs by their nature generate inbound links to your site. Inbound links are the single most important factor in building your Google page rank and search engine positioning.
Developing a Successful Blogging Strategy
Developing a blog that achieves your business goals and objectives requires more than just installing the application and turning it on. I can assist you in:
- Planning additional (non-blogging) content.
- Developing blog categories, tags and taxonomies.
- Blog post feature image methodology, format and sizes.
- Deciding whether or not visitor comments are allowed and setting appropriate comment requirements (anonymous comments okay, registration required to post a comment, etc.).
- Comment spam handling.
- Author identity (real or pseudo) … one very successful blog is “written” by a race horse.
- Promoting your authors as “personalities”.
- Posting strategy (frequency, one author or many, guest bloggers, etc.).
- Handling, displaying and retaining the usefulness of older blog posts.
- User subscriptions by RSS feed or Email.
- Social networking integration.
- Potential for integrating automated “syndication” of content from other Websites.
- Using content, quotes and embedded videos from outside sources without creating copyright violation issues.
- Attention generation through sliders (slide shows), news tickers, widgets, pop-ups, etc.
- Optimized blog navigation … getting to posts, locating posts of interest, post-to-post navigation, etc.
- And much more …
Getting Started!
I can create a “turnkey” blog for you as a free-standing Website or a component on your current site. The process is quick and likely less expensive than you envision. I know and understand the themes and plug-ins that can turn your blog from “ordinary” to “extraordinary” and can optionally train selected member of your staff in the “car and feeding” of your new blog. I look forward to guiding you into the blogosphere!
I collaborate effectively with clients all over the world using telephone, Email and live screen sharing ... ask for a reference list. You can contact me right now at 505.750.4728 or PatRiley@DigitalPersonalities.com!
