Your Business Needs A Blog

Think of your company’s Blog as your own promotional vehicle. Call it what you want, but if you plan your blog like an ongoing helpful information center, it will endear you to new prospects, as well as your existing customers.

People want helpful hints, fresh ideas, new perspectives, special deals and ‘partnerships.’ How are you getting the word out about the things that make your business special? How are you personalizing and humanizing your business? How are you getting direct feedback to help your customer service and future planning? Why should people care about your business if they don’t have an immediate need for your services or products?

Your website can’t do what a custom Blog can do. Chances are you don’t add new material regularly or offer casual advice on what is principally an online brochure. By nature, people don’t make return trips to a web site once they’ve reviewed it to see who and what you really are all about.

Give the public the idea that your Blog is loaded with good ideas and unique applications with periodic special deals, and you’ll have an interactive site that will create repeat visitors. It can promote your web site as you point to product/service features that are explained there. And your web site can link to your Blog.

Promote your Blog as its own special entity. Don’t just put a blog on your website. That doesn’t work. Make it special, give it its own identity and you’ll draw a whole new audience. Have special cards made up that strictly promotes your Blog.  Your Blog should have its own URL and your customers need to see it as an idea source, not a sales pitch. You could even promote the services of other companies you work with to enhance your Blog’s value. And you can be a guest on other Blogs to expand your Blog’s readership as their readers find out about yours.

Without a Business Blog, you are missing a great opportunity.

Many Business Blogs promote their URL and when you arrive at the Blog, you’re right at the latest post to start reading. That makes for a great resource site since it gets right to the heart of the Blog with no distractions. But here’s a suggested arrangement that’s a little different.

In this arrangement by Greta Schulz, (www.GretaSchulz.com/Blog)  Greta has added an interesting twist to her excellent Blog. She has added an Email newsletter to the mix which she sends out to her list of individuals that have requested it. I’m on her Email list and I recently received the April issue.

The first thing on her Email Newsletter (SELLutions from Greta Schulz), is the key article she has prepared – part of it that is! It stops midway through and offers, Read More > which takes you direct to her Blog where you’ll see the complete article as a recent post. The Blog is nicely laid out and contains the appropriate Blog infrastructure, including an archive of recent post articles.

The Email newsletter offers a lot of things that her readers would likely be interested in, including recommended books and seminar info, and by itself serves to deliver her Blog to a growing list of interested people, rather than depending on customers and prospects to remember to read it regularly. Of course with the Blog address above, you can visit the Blog directly at any time and share it with others.

Greta’s web site is www.schulzbusiness.com and contains a brief video intro from Greta with easy access to all her key areas of expertise. You can sign up to receive her Email newsletter on the web site.

Notice that she has integrated the primary Social Media, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, into all her sites. The newsletter is proactive for the Blog, the web site enhances the Blog and the Blog can enhance the web site. The web site of course offers her free Email newsletter. The Social Media enhances all of them.

Here are some ideas that you could start working on to maintain a steady flow of material that your readers will appreciate: 

1. Testimonials from customers in the form of posts that give examples of how your products or services are being used
2. Leading questions that can stir interest as you provide solutions
3. Introduce new applications, products or services for what you provide
4. Publish excerpts from articles from local and national media that might apply
5. Your own news releases – edit them and maybe add some additional comments
6. Information about your employees, promotions, deals, certifications, etc. that humanize your business
7. New Product announcements, even from periphery products that may interact with your services or products
8. Introduce your interaction with Twitter and Facebook to build your lead list
9. New hours, locations, special capabilities, sales, discounts
10. Event reminders where you plan to have representation
11. Occasional humorous entries to keep from seeming to serious
12. Guest posts from colleagues or customers
13. Trends and warnings that may help readers be aware of business situations
14. Plan a contest with an exceptional prize that will spread throughout your community – Tweet it and put it on your Facebook Page as well as ask everyone you know to help promote it in their Blogs and Tweets. Could go viral!

  A Blog shouldn’t be a self-serving vehicle to simply tout your products. That bores people and kills readership. The purpose of a Business Blog is to create interest in a variety of topics within your realm that will interest potential prospects, old customers and continuing customers. That list of content should include items of interest that may have no direct relationship with what you offer. Remember, your goal is to build a community of followers that will find it beneficial to read your blog on a regular basis, but not necessarily to read about your business. All valuable information you post will ultimately accrue to you as an expert in your field, since you are the purveyor of the information.

Think of your Business Blog as a sort of special interest ‘magazine’ that people will enjoy perusing as well as a place to learn about some special sales and deals.

Think of yourself as a valuable resource for areas in which you have an expertise. You must have some lesser areas of interest that could surround your business that will appear to some folks that could lead to larger possibilities. There’s a better than even chance that you will become known as the local expert in your field, regardless of who your competition may be. Why? Because you will have created an accessible, valuable and timely information center from which many others can come to learn, comment, ask questions and leave unsolicited testimonials. Don’t forget, you are in control of what comments get published since you can delete any inappropriate ones before they’re published.

 One important way to get traffic to your Blog is to tell the Search Engines about your Blog. They’ll find you over time but why not educate them as soon as your Blog is up and running to get a head start. The following links will connect you to the primary Search Engines to submit your URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

Google

Yahoo!

The Open Directory

MSN’s Live Search

Getting the Search Engines to know about your URL promptly will improve your chances of getting it picked up by keyword searches from the very beginning.