Five Great Business Blogging Ideas
April 28, 2009 by Melissa Donovan · Leave a Comment
Have you ever thought about adding a blog to your business website? The benefits of business blogging can be great, but there are obstacles that you must overcome, problems you must solve, and challenges you must face before you can launch a business blog.
For starters, you need to have a solid content development plan. What topics will your blog cover? Just news and announcements about your business or industry? What else could you possibly write about on a business blog?
Fortunately, there are plenty of areas to explore in terms of topic. The main ingredient you need for any blog is a good writer – someone who can produce compelling content. A clever and talented writer can make the dryest subject in the world juicy and interesting.
Business Blogging
Business blogging is really no different than most other blogging endeavors. Business bloggers are often working to grow their subscriber base, readership, and traffic. Businesses are looking for ways to grow their customer base and doing so through an effective online presence can be highly beneficial.
Business blogging provides a number of opportunities for improving your online presence and increasing your online success. You can grow traffic to your site, gain rank on search engines, and publish quality content that other websites will link to.
But how can you also leverage your blog to grow your business, increase sales, and connect with your customers?
Five Business Blogging Ideas
From lengthy blog posts that feature your products and services and describe them in great detail to shorter posts that showcase photos or videos that depict your merchandise in action, business blogging offers ample opportunites for sharing news and information about your business offerings. Here are just a few ideas for how to use your blog to promote your business:
1. Products and Services
Write posts with images and descriptions of your products and services to help people better understand what you offer. Be sure to include a mix of newly launched products along with your core or staple products. And don’t forget to highlight the benefits of your offerings!
2. Customer Service
Every business has tons of stories about customer service. Good service, bad customers, and vice versa. Use business blogging as showcase to demonstrate how your business has helped customers. Offer a question-and-answer format that invites customers to send in questions, which you then answer on your blog. Or, encourage customers to send in brief letters or testimonials and post these on your blog.
3. Specials and Discounts
A blog is one of the best places to inform customers about specials or discounts that you’re offering. You can design promotions especially for your blog readers or subscribers, or you can offer open specials and simply promote them on your blog.
4. Features and Benefits
Do more than describe your products and services. Explain the features they boast and the benefits they offer for those who use them. A business blog is a great place to go into greater detail regarding how your product or service will improve people’s lives and solve their problems. Use examples. Tell stories. Compel people to buy.
5. Multimedia
You can post a wide range of media on your blog – images, audio, video, and text. This means there’s no limit to the content you can create and share on your blog. Did you recently do a radio spot or TV commercial? Make sure you post it on your blog. Have you run an ad in the local paper? Post it.
Blogging for Business
Once you sit down and start brainstorming the material you can share through business blogging, you’ll be surprised at just how much fodder for blogging a business actually provides. There are great benefits to be had through a business blog, so what are you waiting for?
Not sure where to start? Need to hire a professional blogger? Scribizzy offers a full suite of blog services, including business blogging. You can even get a quote online!
How Business Blogging Generates Online Success
March 17, 2009 by Melissa Donovan · 1 Comment
Every day, more and more business owners are finding out that business blogging can do wonders for online success. But that success requires more than launching a blog and publishing posts.
A successful business blog is well-planned and built on a strategy, which is executed in a meaningful way.
Before launching a business blog, it’s helpful to understand the benefits that your company can reap through business blogging. Then, you’ll be able to develop a plan specific to your business needs.
Here’s a look at how business blogging can help grow your business and improve your online presence.
Regular Updates for Google Goodness
Nobody except the geniuses at Google knows exactly what makes the world’s most popular search engine tick. The algorithm that determines where a website ranks in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is top secret. What we do know is that Google gives good love to sites that make regular updates as well as sites with lots of inbound links. By making changes to your website and adding to it, you can earn some hearty Google juice and increase your website’s rank. One of the most effective ways to regularly update your site is with a blog.
Linkability
Every time someone links to your website, the Google gods smile upon you. There are many ways to get inbound links. You can launch a bunch of websites and link to yourself. You can trade links with other website owners. You can even pay for links. But nothing works like good old-fashioned organic linkage. To get that, you need to produce content that interests people enough to want to share it. You can easily use a blog to publish content and then promote it by networking with other bloggers and leaving comments on their blogs. Links are one of the foremost ways to draw traffic to your website via business blogging.
Keywords and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Unless you have a gargantuan website, there probably aren’t a lot of opportunities for you to plant enough keywords on your site to really gain traffic through popular search terms. Also, keywords can be obvious when they’re packed into a small space, and this renders the text unfriendly to readers. Business blogging provides infinite opportunities to implement keywords on a regular basis, so you can expand your keyword pool and place more keywords throughout your website.
Customer Outreach
The online marketplace is increasingly competitive, so it’s essential for business owners to find innovative ways to communicate with customers. A blog gives you a permanent platform that you can use to talk to your customers. Tell them what you’re offering, how it’s important, and why they should buy it from you. Offer specials and discounts to subscribers. Announce new products and run contests or collect feedback from your readers. This empowers you as a business owner and it also puts some power into the hands of consumers, who appreciate having their voices heard and concerns addressed.
Promote Transparency
The latest trend in politics, pop culture, and business is transparency. Talking about your company’s mission, business philosophy, and professional practices helps build trust and customer loyalty. To practice transparency, you need a way to communicate the inner workings of your business with the public. Business blogging is perfect for that — a blog provides an open forum where you can share information about your operations, policies, and procedures. Some bloggers even publish their revenue information, which is the height of true transparency in business.
Establish Credibility
If you’re practicing transparency by discussing the inner workings of your business on a blog, then you’re also establishing credibility, which is essential for gaining trust among perspective buyers. Trust is especially important online because there’s a lack of face-to-face interaction. There are also tons of snake oil sites on the web, which strive to sucker buyers with fake or useless products and empty promises. By establishing professional credibility, you can earn trust and loyalty from far more customers.
Publicity and Media Platform
Traditional marketing is expensive. All those brochures, business cards, yellow pages, and newspaper advertisements add up. Marketing online isn’t always free, but it sure can be more cost-effective than doing it the old fashioned way. A blog is a permanent advertisement for your business, a place where you can publish news and announcements, including product launches and specials. You can embed videos and if you’re lucky, one of them will go viral, bringing hoards of hungry consumers to your site.
Professional Online Networking
Businesses need other businesses. Professionals must connect with one another, and blogs are great for networking online. You can interact with other professionals whose products and services complement yours and forge valuable partnerships with them, which can lead to growth and expansion for all parties. Blog networking is a modern phenomenon but a powerful one. Links, blogrolls, and comments all provide ways for business blogging professionals to interact, get to know each other, and develop lasting relationships.
Get Busy Business Blogging
A blog isn’t an endeavor to enter lightly. It takes some planning and there’s a lot to learn. For starters, there’s the blog design and associated technology like plugins and widgets that make a blog more effective and user friendly. Then there’s the strategy involved, plus the challenge of producing relevant, compelling content on a regular basis. In future posts, we’ll be exploring all of these components and many more, so stay tuned.
Are you interested in business blogging? Scribizzy can help! We offer a full suite of blog services.
