Dear Business Owner,
Blogs have been here for more than ten years now. However, I still find that many of the business owners that I have talked to, do not understand what blogging is, or how it can significantly benefit their business. If you have a business, and have never considered running a blog, you've got to read the following. I also highly recommend you to read a great little book called Naked Conversations (which also co-inspired this blog entry).
In this entry I will:
- give you some background information about blogging
- explain why running a blog is essential to your business
- give a few tips on running a blog well
Background on blogs
Blogs range from individual diary type pages to well established topical blogs with millions of visitors per month. Some of these blogs are so well established that they get cited in the press and television often. The variety of people who blog is great. Bloggers range from high-school students commenting on the latest video games to GM’s Vice Chairman Bob Lutz (GM Fast Lane Blog). Blogs are becoming the new and powerful PR channel for both small and large businesses. They are helping individual professionals to get out to the world, but also help big businesses, such as Microsoft, get a better image among their customers. To a great extent, because of allowing employees to blog, Microsoft is not viewed as the “borg” any more. These blogs are written by the company’s employees from all ranks. If you are your business, then you write the blog yourself but you can also have strategic partners contribute to it.
There are two key distinctive features of blogs. The first is that they are written by individuals, rather then “the company”, without having the information chewed by numerous editors (who cares about bland press releases any more). The second feature is the ability of any reader to post comments to the blog and the author responding, thus creating a two-way communication, or in other words a conversation. People talking to people vs. the one way communication of press releases and other pushed content in the old-fashioned cold corporate PR way.
Let's look at history - web sites were becoming popular and their value was being realized by the masses in the mid 90s. In the same fashion, today blogs are becoming the new way of communication. It may be a little strong to say “Blog or die”, but if a company or an organization does not blog they will definitely be at a disadvantage. I would strongly recommend that everyone reads“Naked Conversations” – a very insightful book, which describes and gives numerous real-life examples of how blogs are changing the way big and small companies communicate with their customers. You can check the authors' blog at http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/naked_conversations/index.html.
How a blog can help your business
There are many examples about blogs run by professionals who write about what they are experts in - their profession. Posting often and about interesting topics has made certain bloggers the go-to destination for information. Giving out some of their expert knowledge for free has brought these people incredible credibility and guess what- who would not hire their services; who would not register to hear them speak at a conference? The media is also looking at blogs quite often as a source for news and trends.
Now let's look at you and your business or practice. If you have one, obviously you are good at it. If you get a blog, and post one entry each week within your field of expertise you can show the world that you are good at it and that you are an actual person who does not hide behind a cold incorporated identity. When you post often, the secondary benefit that you will get is the increased visitor traffic coming from search engines because Google, Yahoo and the rest like content that is constantly updated (such as blog pages). One more thing - you won't just get any traffic, but you will get relevant traffic, meaning people searching for the information that you provide. Companies actually pay (lots of) money to get these kinds of visitors by doing expensive search engine optimization and paid ads on Google, costing them anywhere form a thousand to tens of thousands of dollars. It can cost you 1 hour of your time a week. Beat that!
So what more specifically should you write about in a blog?
Each article should provide valuable information for your potential and current clients. If you are a life coach, write about resources, exercises, give useful advice, talk about events that are coming up, get your coachees and potential coachees to think and act. If you are a technology professional, write about the latest trends in your industry, good and bad practices, what products your customers should be aware of, etc. Take your specific practice, think for about 5 minutes and I am sure you can come up with at least 3 good blog entry topics that will be interesting and useful for your current and future clients to read. Now that you have your first 3 topics, write their titles down for when you have your blog setup.
Before continuing I would like to clear one thought of concern that is probably bugging you by now. You are probably thinking: "I am so busy as of right now that I can't spend all that time writing and editing articles." I agree that you are super busy! I am, too ,with all my projects. But truth is that you can be busy and run your blog. Blog entries do not have to be like magazine articles - to take many hours of writing and editing. In fact a great blog entry can be 3 paragraphs long and take you 15 minutes to publish. If you write once a week, that's 15 minutes/week. My personal experience is that it takes me between 30 minutes to an hour to write a blog entry at the rate of 1 per week. Now that is nothing for the benefits that a blog gets you!
Four best practices for blogging
These recommendations for running your blog are very simple and vital:
- Post often - once a day if you can, or at least once a week.
- Write in your own style, conversationally. Corp-talk is a no-no. A typo here and there is permissible. Write as long or as short as you'd like.
- Never sell your services when you write blog entry. Readers will be turned off by it. Instead, provide valuable information.
- Reply to comments - this is all about talking with your readers (and potential/current customers).
Key benefits
Having said all that, let me summarize the key benefits that you will get from running a good blog:
- Trust. You will establish yourself as a subject-matter expert within your field. People will know more about you than just from a cold static website.
- Potential customers. You will drive relevant traffic to your web site from search engines.
- Popularity. With the growing number of people coming to your site of course your popularity as an expert will increase.
- Returning visitors. Your current and potential customers will come back again and again to read your new articles.
- Word of mouth. Who doesn't like word of mouth marketing. It is the cheapest and most effective of all kinds of marketing. When you post often valuable content, people will talk about your blog, they will link to it and send it in emails to their friends.
- Competitive edge - if writing your blog makes you trustworthy, popular and establishes you as an expert, of course you will have a huge competitive advantage among the rest in your profession who willfully, or not, chose to ignore the enormous benefit of blogging.
Examples of successful blogs
I have compiled a list of blogs that I would encourage you to visit. Most of them are blogs of individual professionals, some of which are already extremely popular and cited by media.
I cannot possibly cover all the benefits, advice and examples that I can give about blogging in one blog entry (that's already a long entry!). I hope that what i just said has given you some insights and ideas of how you can benefit by running your blog. I am sure that you are having some ideas after visualizing your future blog. I welcome you to post your comments and questions in the comments section below. I will respond promptly to keep the good conversation going.