7 Reasons to Put a Blog on your Business Website
1. The world is turning to RSS
RSS feeds are becoming one of the most popular for internet surfers stay in touch with the businesses, organizations, and people for which they have an interest. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 and the popularity of Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers, people are finding out how easy it is to subscribe to a website’s feed to stay current with important announcements, information, and updates. While email newsletters are still the most vital connection between a business and it’s customers, a blog’s feed is a great way for people to stay in touch with a website.
2. Blogging is publicly interacting with people
When you publish an article on your blog, whether it be a few sentences or dozens of paragraphs, you are openly inviting people to respond to your thoughts. This is a great way to build a sense of community and get honest feedback about your company’s actions. If you crack easily under criticism, a business blog isn’t for you. While you can moderate comments, you can be a hero if you can explain or justify a tough business decision. While not everyone will read your blog, the ones who do are the ones you need to win over. If you look at this as an opportunity, you’ll experience success with a blog.
3. Blogging is transparent, raw, human
You can’t expect a blog to be just another piece of PR or marketing. It has to be your thoughts on the actual process of running your business, your ideas, your hopes. By being transparent, you risk exposure, but you gain the trust of those who read your blog. They see you as a real person, a person with fears of failure, a person trying to make a difference, trying to support a family, running a business. Most people identify with this type of raw emotion. You don’t have to announce that you only have $10 left in your business checking, but talking about the challenges of running a business can build you a solid level of support and loyal customers that advertising can never do.
4. Blogging builds anticipation
By writing about your long-term plans and ideas, you help build anticipation for customers, vendors, and others you deal with on a regular basis — including employees. People like knowing that the brains of the operation is looking to the future, not just resting on their laurels. By sharing ideas, even if they don’t quite happen as you hoped, you build a fan club of people who support you, and some may even go so far as to comment and give you suggestions to help you.
5. Blogs help search engines find you
Search engines favor sites that are updated frequently. Although much of your information for your business doesn’t change too often, a blog is a great way to let search engines that you are actively keeping your site up to date. Dynamic content is a sure mark of an active site. Too many business websites tend to become stale — or look stale. Plus, a blog lets new visitors know that you treat your website seriously, and thus, by connection, that you treat your business equally seriously. This makes it more likely they will contact you for service. Anyone who has made phone calls or visited businesses based on information found on the web knows all too well the frustration of finding out that they no longer offer that service, or have moved. With a frequently updated blog, visitors can quickly see that you are an active participant in your website, even if Brevard Web Hosting or some other designer did most of the work.
6.Blogging is free marketing
While you shouldn’t use your blog just to repeat marketing, it doesn’t hurt to link to it, or cover it briefly. Writing about how hard you worked on a new campaign that you’ll be starting this spring is a great way to draw a reader into the very idea that you are selling in the campaign — all without explicitly repeating the campaign itself. Or you can use the blog to talk about some of the great items you were able to mark down in your upcoming sale. But, generally, you’ll want to express yourself personally in your business blog and not let it sound too dry or corporate, else readers will tire. So, if you keep it interesting, you’ll find that your readers will actually read your occasional marketing post with much more interest than a would a full-color glossy direct mail piece.
7. Blogging is super-easy
Brevard Web Hosting makes it easy for you or your designated employees to login and create new posts. New posts are added automatically in seconds, no matter what time of day you do it. No one has to know you typed it at 2:45am. If you can type an email, you can add a new post to your blog.
If you are interested in adding a blog to your existing website, contact us. You can explore the Brevard Web Hosting blog to see a little about how a blog works. You might notice that the latest posts automatically show up on the home page of this site so new visitors can quickly see what the latest news is without having to go to the blog itself. Although we openly call it a blog, you don’t have to. Outside visitors don’t even have to know that it technically is a web log. A blog can be setup in many different and imaginative ways.
Additional Resources
Beginner’s Guide to Business Blogging, an excellent 40-page guide to
understanding, launching and maintaining a blog as a business and marketing
tool – by Debbie Weil, corporate blogging consultant and author of The Corporate Blogging Book (Penguin Portfolio 2006).
Blogs will Change your Business, Business Week, Cover Story, May 2, 2005.
Business and Blogging – a b5 media blog about business blogging.
