Business Blogging Basics
Audience: Small Business Owners
Purpose: This article blogging as a tool for promoting your business.
Author: Jonathan Bailey — © Bailey & Hall 2006 Article Date: 2006-09-30
Last Updated: 2007-02-27
Introduction | Why You Should Blog | A Note of Caution | Summary
Introduction
Like everything else on the world wide web, blogs are probably older than you think. The word blog is short for weblog and is used to describe an online journal or diary, a concept that dates back to at least 1994. They didn't explode into the phenomenon they are today until sometime after 2000.
These days it seems everyone has a blog. I would venture to say that all the major news outlets have several high-profile correspondents that keep blogs. Blogs have made the mainstream news (quite literally in the case of Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report) and influenced political careers.
Why Should You Blog
For small businesses blogs can be an effective promotional tool on several levels.
First and foremost, if well-written, blogs can provide your customers with a sense of personal affinity toward your company that hasn't existed since before Wal-Mart in that halcyon, small-town era when you knew the owner of the bakery by name and the doctor made house calls. As I'm sure you appreciate this kind of personal relationship is invaluable in many businesses.
Second, blogs provide search engines a source of continuous content that reinforces their "perception" of your site. If you talk about your business in your blog then the key words you are targeting in the search engines should come up frequently and this can only help your page rankings.
Finally, if you are particularly witty, profound, authoritative, or have some other way of attracting attention, your blog might get widely picked up by feed services or syndicators and provide a continuous stream of very-well qualified customers to your site. And what could be better than that.
A Note of Caution
Blogs require three things to be effective: Good content that will appeal to more than you and your immediate friends, the ability to string two sentences together that make sense and don't sound like a college term paper, a significant commitment of time.
Summary
Blogs don't make sense for every business and certainly not every person. You have to have the right abilities, content and a commitment to making it work for this communication channel to pay off. However, if you have these things the ROI can be modest or.... extraordinary.
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