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Business Blog Step 2 - Why Have a Blog?

Guest post by: Gary Baker

Article Overview: A business blog is an excellent marketing tool. With search engines now the no. 1 research tool, it is important for a company to have visibility on the web when customers are making buying decisions. Of course for those businesses without a website, then it may be appropriate to use the blog as your website rather than pay for one which others may need to update for you.

Business Blog Step 2 - Why Have a Blog?

A business blog is an excellent marketing tool. With search engines now the no. 1 research tool, it is important for a company to have visibility on the web when customers are making buying decisions. Of course for those businesses without a website, then it may be appropriate to use the blog as your website rather than pay for one which others may need to update for you.

As a top level overview, blogs will help to:

• display your expertise in your field, and build your reputation and credibility
• open dialogue with potential customers and strengthen relationships with current clients
• improve your search engine rankings and increase visitors to your site
• facilitate a greater understanding of your business and what it can offer
• broadcast information to those you want to receive it

A business blog can be integrated perfectly as part of your online marketing tools and strategies whether your blog is part of your current website or stands alone. This can be done in-house or out-sourced to a specialist.

It is excellent as a tool to help to generate traffic for a website and to inform (and hopefully impress!). It will also give the opportunity to pre-qualify potential customers by sharing information with them.

The more that they know and understand about you and the services / products that you supply, then the more likely they are to feel secure in buying from you when a need arises - and indeed the more quickly that they may realise that need does exist.

In terms of specific uses, they are excellent for "educational marketing", product testing and announcements, broadcasting public relations, getting customer feedback, delivering promotions and announcements and they open the door to many other possibilities.

They are also very powerful tools for developing information sources, teams and relationships inside an organisation. In some circles, it is considered that for larger organisations, this will become one of the main uses of a blog because of its ability to store and share information.

Use it to inform and develop relationships, get feedback on ideas and show depth of knowledge. At the end of the day, a business blog is one of many marketing tools which should be used as part of an overall marketing campaign.

However, it is hugely influential and an excellent way to engage with potential customers, inform and influence them in a way that no other method can achieve with the same degree of interaction and reach.

In summary, a personal or business blog can be used to achieve the following;

• Positioning as an expert
• Niche branding
• Educational marketing
• Building a network
• Enhancing reputation and credibility
• Broadcasting news and information
• Developing a public face for the business
• Broadcasting powerful press releases
• Promoting conferences, seminars, exhibitions and events
• Developing better client relationships
• Promoting client case studies
• Gaining customer feedback
• Customer support

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Article Tags: business blog, internet marketing, internet marketing tools, main search engines, search engine, search engine optimisation, search engines, search engines



Related Forum Posts
Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategy - Hi David, I agree about the Blogosphere. You have a smaller group that Blog, but do so on the premise that they think they should, but have never really considered the purpose of their Blog. Then I think there are a few SEO or Internet Marketing types that see Blogging as just another link building strategy. But the largest group of Bloggers, tend to be people who enjoy writing and discussing their topics of interest. Blogging is good for link building, but the true Blogger is a breed apart from the rest. They want to dialog, to debate, to have feedback and they are very willing to link to other worthwhile conversations that are relevant to their topic. I agree with you. These group of Bloggers obviously are passionate about their writing and together, they create huge conversation trails interactive and travel from Blog to Blog. But the evidence is clear with this group that loves what they write about. With comments enabled on a Blog and having a Blog tuned to a specific purpose you already have the evidence of original Social Media.
Re: Alexa Ranking Goals - That's great GT! What method did you use to put up the Entrepreneur Blog Network in your Wordpress Blog? We're always looking for the easiest methods to help bloggers who are not techies get involved.
EvanCarmichael.com suggestion - Maybe I missed it but I would like to suggest that a Blog be created to support the Forum. The idea is that in the blog you put in snippets of some of the biggest conversations with a 'read more' link to the forum itself. Setting up the Blog and clipping some conversations onto it wouldn't take very long.
Jen's Blog - Spam protection - Jen, I like the Blog and just posted a comment to one of your articles. From my experience you need to implement some sort of SPAM capture tools. i use them on my Blog and it's been a life saver as I'm getting hit by spam atleast 5 times a day. I use Wordpress and they have plugins like Captcha and SPAM Karma installed.
Blog Marketing Anyone? - Hi Kevin I suppose you could use the same SEO principles on a Blog as you can for a website but the more content you have within your Blog, the better rankings/traffic you would receive. Would you have time to write a full length article with tips in it every day or second day to get the article count rolling over every week? I would also like to know if anyone has had any experiences with marketing blogs and the traffic they received.


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