So what can a Business Blog do for you? How can it return the cost in setting it up and the on-going investment in time in updating it? Does it suit your business? 

Here’s a 10 point guide to your own part of the blogosphere.

Why blog for business?

1.  A Blog offers you the opportunity to show how much you know (though not to sound like a know-all..)! It presents you with a platform where you can establish yourself as an authority in your field. 

Would you prefer to do business with someone you don’t know and aren’t sure how much they know about what they’re doing? Or with someone who has a personality and seems to know what they’re talking about?

2.  ‘Content is king’: The old adage rides again. One of the key benefits of a Business Blog is in the SEO. The regular content updates on your site (via posts to your blog) attracts the search engines. The more frequently you post, the more frequently you will be crawled by the bots (search engines). It offers you the opportunity for more keyword placement, allows you to interlink your pages as you link back to your own pages and other posts. All of which will drive more traffic to your site.

‘Sharing is caring’: (we’re full of pithy aphorisms today). As people come to your blog and it becomes popular, you will get people linking back to it from other sites as they share your content, thereby getting ‘deep links’ back to your site. All good SEO.

3.  A blog allows you to share information with your customers and prospects and others interested in the same area and it can act as a channel for news updates relating to your business. 

4.  It also gives you the chance to interact with your customers and prospects. You can ask questions and receive feedback via the comment forms on your blog. You can ask questions, perhaps about new products, and answer questions. Your customers and potential customers can engage with you in an informal way. They are then more likely to do business with you subsequently.

 How do I set it up?

5.  WordPress is a wonderful blogging platform.

WordPress

This is an open-source software (ie. free) which can be installed very easily. The software is easy to use with a user-friendly CMS (customer management system) and comes out-of-the-box with all the blogging functionality you need – posts structure, tags, categories, comment forms etc. You can use categories to organise your posts. So, if a visitor is interested in a particular topic, they can view posts by Category. You can also use Tags to give a more granular way to search through your posts. Comments can be moderated, with options for different levels, so that you might moderate the first comment of a visitor and let the others through automatically, or you may choose to moderate all comments. So no nasty or spammy type comments.

Plug-ins are available to control spam, optimise for search engines (SEO) and sharing buttons, aswell as many others. Sharing buttons are important to allow your content to be linked to across the blogosphere, this will bring you more traffic as time goes on.

6.  For SEO benefits, it is important to have your blog hosted on your own website. You can quickly set up a blog on wordpress.com or blogger.com, but these will not bring traffic to your own website. 

How to I blog successfully?

7.  The success of any blog depends on the goals starting out. First of all decide what your content will relate to and determine who your target audience is. Your business blog should keep to topics which are of interest to your target audience and are within your realm of expertise.

8.  The blog must be regular. Some blogs start off well, but after a few months, the posts taper off and the benefits are lost. Start how you mean to continue and decide how often you are going to post, and stick to it. It should be scheduled as an activity, and not something to be done when you have a few minutes free (because you never will have!). The posts do not have to be done by one person, as long as the person writing is in a position of knowledge on the topic.

8.  Use keywords in your blog titles to increase your SEO. Each post has it’s own web page and URL and these are known as permalinks and do not change. So, having a keyword in the URL of the post is beneficial for SEO and as people link to the post, the link remains in place and will not change as time goes on. This is important for search engines, as they don’t like to have pages indexed that subsequently have broken links.

9.  Make it easy for visitors to subscribe to your blog. Have a RSS feed option and an option to subscribe by email. FeedBurner is a free service which allows blog subscriptions by email and is easy to place on your site.

10.  Write in an engaging way and keep it short and snappy. Structure your posts so that the reader can see at first glance what it’s about. (No-one wants to see what you had for breakfast or what you thought about it.)

• keep sentences short
• use headings 
• use bullet points
• use active verbs
• ask questions and look for feedback
• highlight key words and phrases
• link to relevant sources or other posts
• have personality!

Thinking of outsourcing your Blog?

If you’re thinking of outsourcing your blog, then beware. A blog is not likely to be successful if the person writing it is not close to the subject matter and it will quickly become evident.

And don’t consider setting up a fake blog to promote your business. These ‘flogs‘ (fake blogs) will only serve to undermine your reputation when you get found out – which you probably will. They are akin to ‘infomercials‘ and ‘advertorials’.

See examples of Business Blogs in the Irish Blog Awards Shortlist for 2010.

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