Why write a business blog? What is it and what will ill it do for you or your business? Where do companies go wrong? How should you approach it?
A Blog – as a business sales tool
The main purpose in writing a blog is to connect with a wider audience. For personal blogs, this is about sharing your thoughts and ideas on various topics and encouraging feedback and discussion. For business, a blog is ultimately about creating sales opportunities from a wider audience using the same concept – (thoughts, ideas, discussion, feedback).
If you’re unsure how this fits within your marketing activities, think of it like a ‘newspaper’ rather than a diary or series of essays. You are the main Editor controlling the agenda, topics and presentation. You aim is to catch your readers attention at the start of each blog and draw them in to read the entire article. The articles will be relevant to your business, products and services. More importantly, they need to be relevant to your customers concerns, requirements and interests.
Where do businesses get this wrong?
Most business get this wrong in two ways
- The first, by using the blog like a sales advert. Online customers are very savvy to this approach and your target audience will quickly switch off removing any sales potential from your blog.
The second area where businesses get this wrong is with commitment and discipline. A business needs to
- assign responsibility for their blog,
- make sure a realistic commitment is set to update the blog and
- then ensure the discipline is there to keep this consistent.
Many firms start with an unrealistic goal to write a blog every day which soon peters out, when once a week would suffice. Again it’s critical to maintain the momentum and update the blog consistently so it’s audience can rely on it as well as staying fresh in their mind.
What you need to do
The immediate goal for a business blog is to establish trust with your audience to indirectly generate sales in the future. This can be done by providing free honest helpful information to genuine customer issues/problems in an open way.
If this is done on a regular basis you begin to establish credibility as an expert in your field. You begin to build a loyal target audience who will revisit you blog on a regular basis. Your target audience then become your sales reps, passing on your details when they encounter someone with a similar issue they know you can solve.
Providing helpful information is all very well, but for a business it ultimately needs to generate sales. The key then for increased business from your blog, is to link it with the services/product you offer, but without overtly touting for sales or turning the blog into a sales advert.
You are more likely to buy from someone if:-
- You hear from them on a regular basis (via their blog)
- You see them as an expert in their field
- You can trust their advice
- You know what products and services their business offers
- You see them being helpful and selfless on a regular basis with other people
A clever way to do this is to use your blog to answer genuine customer questions / concerns / issues that arise in your business. This engages directly with your customers in an honest way and if you allow comments on the blog you’ll be amazed at the feedback (note as a blog owner you decide which comments to allow/be displayed.
A Blog can add value to your website for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
An internal blog also provides additional benefits for a business website and its search engine ranking. Search engines look for websites with regularly updated and unique content. Blogs are the ideal platform for this. If your blog allows for people to comments (as long as they’re moderated) this is even better. So if a search engine knows you have a blog on your website it will revisit on a regular basis to re-index the website. This provides an opportunity to climb the rankings more quickly. Moreover if the blog is populated with important keywords and topics relevant to the website and its overall SEO strategy, this will add great value to the SEO goal and ranking improvement. In addition if the blog makes it easy for people to share, link back, get RSS feeds and email to friends – it can also be a good tool to build links to your site. Relevant Backlinks to your website are another important SEO measure.
I hope you found this article on the importance of a business blog and how it can help your business. If you have any further comments to add, I would be delighted to hear from you.
Maurice McGee
