Your Business Can Benefit from a Blog!

For many years, a blog has been looked at as simply an online journal, a place for people to post less than interesting but highly personal thoughts, ideas, and musings about their daily routine. This perception obviously did not excite the general public, and certainly did not excite the already overworked and highly brand concious small business owner.

Today though, the small business owner simply can't afford NOT to have a blog!

It really doesn't matter what industry, a blog can benefit your business in many ways:

1. Create a positive information stream that is outside the traditional marketing world, where your customers can tell you directly what they think and you can foster a type of loyalty that you simply can't buy with advertisements.

2. Build links pointing back at your website. If you are creative and skilled, these posts on your blog may even rank extremely high for specific keywords. This will drive traffic to your site as well as show the search engines that your site is important to that subject.

3. As you attract a readership, you will become seen as an expert in your field. As a result, people will trust you, your company, and your products more and potentially shorten the sales cycle.

4. The more you write, the better you become! Writing is one of the most important skills for any business owner.

5. As you begin to build a relationship with your customers, you will learn honest feedback that will allow you to improve your products and services, or correct problems before they impact your business.

6. You can actually build demand for your more expensive or higher-margin products by talking about them and their value. For instance, if you are an IT consultant and you try to sell someone a new software system it is difficult, but if you blog about the benefits of Small Business Server 2008, your custome might come directly to you and ask you to provide it - without an awkward sales call!

Starting a small business blog isn't easy though, but it doesn't have to be a major chore.

Step One:

Decide what you want your topic to be. If you are a florist, your topic might be what flowers go well for what occasion, or maybe a post each week about a different type of fancy flower. Virtually any subject that you feel comfortable writing about can be a good topic.

Step Two:

Pick a blogging platform. For most business owners, I would recomend WordPress.com or Blogger.com as these are both very easy to setup and maintain, though Blogger.com is probably a bit more so, while WordPress.com provides more flexibility and future upgrades. Both services are free and will provide you with a domain such as: company.blogspot.com or company.wordpress.com.

Step Three:

At this point, it is probably best to pick one of the provided templates that looks good, but is not too fancy. Don't worry, you can always upgrade the template later as you start to learn how people use your blog.

Step Four:

Visit Feedburner, signup for the service and under "Publicize" tab, make sure you activate Ping Shot, so when you update your blog it pings various search engines. This will help spread the news of your posts, and it might even bring people to your site to comment or post about your articles.

You should also include the ability for people to subscribe to your feed by email. Most (non-tech) people I talk with simply don't know what RSS is, but they do know email and that is how they want to receive your updates.

Step Five:

Start posting! Not all of your articles need to be long, but try to make things entertaining and interesting. Be natural, but be professional too.

Step Six:

Promote your Blog! Email your friends, post a link on your website, put a link in your email signature, and of course, add it to Google's Blog Search.

Now that you have your blog up and running don't forget to have fun!