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Business Blog Step 21 - Uses of a Business Blog

Guest post by: Gary Baker

Article Overview: A key phase in creating a successful business blog happens ahead of its launch when you plan out how you want to use your blog, who your target audience is and what you want to achieve with it. All three of these elements are key to its success. If we now take a look at some of the potential types of focus that a business blog can take, then you will see what a powerful tool it can be.

Business Blog Step 21 - Uses of a Business Blog

A key phase in creating a successful business blog happens ahead of its launch when you plan out how you want to use your blog, who your target audience is and what you want to achieve with it. All three of these elements are key to its success. If we now take a look at some of the potential types of focus that a business blog can take, then you will see what a powerful tool it can be.

Demonstrate and communicate your expertise

Most small businesses offer specialist knowledge and skills - it’s what differentiates them - but what they often lack is a way to demonstrate them to potential customers. A Business Blog offers the ability to do this and much more beside. By what you write in your posts and also how you write them, you can show your expertise without overtly selling to your readers – this gives you the chance to build up a positive reputation and a degree of trust with potential clients and partners alike.

Build individual networks and foster collaboration

Small businesses may be specialists but they also need a strong support structure and partners around them. Business blogging is not only an ideal way to start to engage with customers, as we have seen, but also to foster partnerships, collaborations and joint ventures with others in your industry. As you attract other players in your marketplace to your blog, opportunities for collaboration and networking will develop naturally through the conversations taking place.

Communicate with a local, national or global audience

While business blogs are most often used to communicate with a targeted, but geographically widespread, audience, they can also allow you to focus in on a local customer base, primarily by changing the emphasis of the posts and the structure. This flexibility of approach means that small businesses of all types and with all types of customer base can use blogs to promote their business and develop relationships with their customers.

Developing reputation and trust

We all need to get closer to our customers and a business blog is an excellent way to achieve that. It allows us to engage customers and readers of our blog in a way that no other online method can achieve. This in turn gives us the time and the opportunity to develop our reputation in their eyes and foster a high level of trust between ourselves and our customers.

Great search engine rankings

With so many people using the internet to research products and services before they buy, small businesses need to achieve a prominent position and high ranking in Search Engine Results for their chosen key phrases. Business blogs can help immeasurably in this.

The structure of a blog combined with the focused nature of the posts, regular updates and the interlinking which is part and parcel of blogs, will all push you towards the top of the rankings. This makes a blog ideal for small businesses looking for greater visibility and enquiries.

Dominate a niche market

Businesses usually have a set of services or products which are designed to answer the needs of a specific, and often, niche market. Getting exposure in that market is key to being able to dominate it and ensure that your business is the one that the market itself recommends. Using a blog, you can raise your profile and lead the discussions on any aspect affecting that market. Talk about it and get talked about!

Project your personality

As a small business, you will tend to work very closely with your customers. Your expertise is highly important but so are you as a person and how you get on with your customer - a strong relationship will help to ensure that the project develops well. Blogs can let your personality shine through before you enter the relationship and may give you the edge in being selected.

Easy web publishing – no webmaster required!

While we rightly focus on external benefits, we should not forget that there are also solid internal reasons for using a blog in a business and ease of use is right at the top of that list.

Blogs can be used in addition to a business website or as part of it – they can also be used instead of a website. In all of these cases, once established, you can publish new content or change pages on your site without relying on a web designer or webmaster. Reader friendly, user friendly and cost effective.

Research your market

Your blog provides you with a two way communication tool, and the information that you can get from your readers may be highly important. By participating in the discussions that your posts will generate, you should be able to get a clearer idea of what the up to the minute interests of your clients are.

Surveys and focus groups can achieve this to a certain level but open conversations on your Blog will achieve much more, both in terms of depth and breadth.

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Article Tags: blog, blogging, blogging for beginners, business blogs, uses of a blog, wordpress, wordpresscom, wordpressorg



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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.
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
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.


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