Starting a business blog can be an excellent way to promote your business online. It helps you engage with customers, demonstrate that you’re up to date with industry trends and reinforce your corporate identity. It can also help boost your web SEO.
Keeping your customers engaged
A well-written blog can be a great way of reaching out to your customers, keeping them entertained and informed about what’s going on in your world.
Well-written blog copy is a must, as are regular updates, to keep readers coming back. Plan posts ahead of time to avoid a lull when you’re out of inspiration or too busy to write, and don’t be afraid of hiring a professional industry copywriter to ensure a steady stream of content.
A blog which invites readers to reply, comment and send in suggestions promotes the idea of a two-way interaction – be sure to credit good comments and ideas. Even negative remarks can be a way to kick-start a conversation, showing you’re not above responding to critical feedback.
Demonstrating expertise
Your corporate blog should offer informed comment on what’s going on in your industry, along with company updates and thought-provoking opinion pieces.
You could also provide how-to guides, answer customer queries, link out to other relevant expert content, or cover industry events.
Remember that a blog isn’t aiming to sell products directly, but to persuade readers that you know your stuff – indirectly boosting your reputation and cementing customer loyalty.
Corporate identity
A useful, entertaining business blog, by definition, makes your brand look good. By providing extra value, you’re showing that your company cares about the customer relationship.
Establishing a strong ‘corporate voice’ also reinforces your brand values – for example, an authoritative blog will establish the business as one that can be trusted, an informal and entertaining blog as one that’s fun to deal with, and so on.
Boost your SEO
If your blog is hosted on another site (not your own website), you can build up links between the two, which are good news for SEO. Each new blog post should link to your site, and your site back to your blog.
A regularly-updated blog can also help with the ‘freshness factor’ recently introduced by Google – in which recent content is seen as more relevant, and promoted in search rankings.
Including well-researched keywords in your blogs will also boost their visibility and increase the possibility of them being listed by search engines.
Finally, blogs are a good way to create buzz on social media – encouraging readers to share your content and generating more backlinks.
