Blogging As a Business Tool

Businesses of all sizes are taking notice of the benefits of blogging and even some huge multinational corporations have regular updates written personally by the CEO. The reasoning behind this is that it gives the company more of a human face and strengthens the relationship between them and their customers.

There are also benefits for small business owners in writing a corporate blog. It will provide an excellent channel of communication for you to relay the latest developments regarding your company. In addition, you will be able to engage in dialogue with not only your existing customers but also with the other readers who are all also potential customers.

For a blog to be successful it will be important to update regularly and provide original content that is informative or entertaining, otherwise you will not get repeat visitors. An example of this can be found at one of my favourite blogs The Small Business Blog which adds useful content every day to keep small business owners coming back for more. Good content is really the key to cultivating a high readership – there is no shortcut or miracle tool to achieving blog success.

If you do decide to test the waters and start doing a bit of corporate blogging there are a number of applications that will make your life slightly easier. Your first step should be to get a feed reader of some sort (although most modern web browsers now have them built in) and start reading a lot of the most popular blogs. This will help you learn a lot about how the experts are doing it.

When you begin to create a blog you will need to set up RSS (Really Simple Syndication) so that other people can subscribe to your feed. You should be able to do this very easily from your feed reader. It is also common practice to offer an email subscription option for people who have trouble with feeds.

Once you start posting content it is important to get your blog listed in as many (appropriate) directories as possible and ensure that your feed reader is set up to automatically ‘ping’ these directories whenever you post new content. Include a ‘Tell a Friend’ script on each post allowing your readers to e-mail them to someone they know - this will certainly bring more traffic.

Finally, you should use software that will track how much success you are having on your blog. Not only will the traffic statistics be helpful in determining which topics you are writing about are the most popular, it will also provide excellent opportunities for networking once you find out where your visitors are coming from. Do not underestimate the power of being good to the people who visit your blog.