Blogging is good for business

A blog (short for web log) is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs give information on a particular subject and allow readers to leave comments. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. A blog can be private, public or have restricted access.

You can write your blog without any web programming skills. It’s just a matter of choosing a template, start writing, and then hit the ‘publish’ button to make your thoughts public.

This video explains blogs in simple terms.

Why use a blog?

Though blogs are typically thought of as personal journals, there is no limit to what topics may be covered in a blog. You can use a blog for your business. A blog gives you a voice to the world and raises your profile to a broad market. Become an expert in your industry by posting relevant and useful information. If you keep giving something that is seen as being useful, people will keep reading.

I helped a colleague set up a blog two years ago and she now has over 25,000 readers. Imagine having that audience to market your products and services to! The trick to capitalising on this is having your blog linked back to your other web presences – think of it as cross promoting. Plan your blog as part of your overall marketing and promotions strategy.

Some blogging tips

Here are a few tips that I’ve found useful for maintaining a dynamic business blog:

• Blog at least once a week – but not more than three times a week. Less than one post a week and people may lose interest – more than three can be too much information.
• If you can’t blog for a while, post a message on your blog to say you’re away and when you’ll start blogging again. If people arrive on your blog and find you haven’t posted for a few weeks they’ll probably dismiss you and won’t come back.
• Share ideas and resources from a variety of places – don’t just push your own barrow. It carries more weight if you write a post about your own products and services intermittently.
• Link to other blogs – this raises your profile and usually brings return links from those blogs.
• Make sure you have some way of tracking the visitors to your blog. There are a variety of free services you can add to your blog to do this.

Get started with blogging

The best news of all is that blogs are free to set up. It’s easy to get started, just register for an account, follow the prompts and you’ll be blogging in about three steps. Two services that I recommend are Blogger (quick and easy to set up) and WordPress (more complex but with many more features in it). This blog uses WordPress.