Blogging seems to be all the rage now. Many of these are personal blogs, where people just give their opinions on various topics. Others, however, are business blogs. Blogs can let more people find your site, as there will be more content for the search engines to pick up on. And they will be more likely to stick around, as you have interesting content. The first thing you will need to do is pick someone to write your business blog. It needs to be someone who writes well and knows about your business. In some cases, those may not be the same person. Often, in very small businesses, the owner is the only employee. If that is you, it's possible that while you don't write extremely well, you do know a lot about your business. If that is the case, you might try a system where someone else proofreads your blog and corrects and slightly rephrases things where they could be improved. The next think you will need to decide on is what your subject matter will be about. In some types of businesses, it is appropriate for the blog to be slightly more personal in nature. If you are marketing to high school and/or college students, they would be more interested in local events than they would in the details behind your latest business partnership. Another option is to blog to keep clients and others updated on where you are in various projects or what inventory you've gotten in. For a golf store, you might keep your clients up to date on when you're expecting a new line of golf clubs. A third option is like my own blog, where you give advice that will help others, regardless of whether they are your clients/customers or not. On my blog, I try to make sure that you don't have to have a lot of technical expertise to use my advice. I don't blog about how to write HTML. Instead, I blog about the types of features you can have on a site and whether it would be to your advantage to use those features. It's general advice that can be applied to websites whether the reader has a working knowledge of HTML or pays someone else to do that. I've found that my blog (and it's accompanying monthly printed newsletter that's basically the "best of" the blog entries from the previous month) seems to increase my perceived credibility and my approachability. And to get new clients and customers in the door, perceived credibility and approachability is what you need. To keep them, you will need actual credibility and good communication, so hopefully you have both. You can also publish your blog entries to sites like ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com and include a link to your site, which is what I do. Then other sites will also publish your articles, but they have to include those links to your site also. Personally, I post on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I think that any less frequently would be a waste of time. And remember, in addition to making sure the entries will pull in new visitors from search engines, also make sure the article is useful to them. If you are a good writer and write on the types of subjects you mentioned, you'll do well. |
