Using Your Blog to Broaden the Exposure for Your Business
- May 20th, 2009 by Steven Leung
Blogs are websites that keep and organize a running journal of articles. You’ll find many opinions about what style of writing your blog should have, how it should be a participating member of the blogosphere, and lists of do’s and don’ts. “The rules” make blogging sound more complex than it really is for businesses.
Blogs give businesses three distinct advantages. First, your business will have a larger search engine presence. It’s easier to find your business on Google with a blog than without one. This will bring you more traffic that you can convert.
Second, your business will have a fast and convenient way of publishing ad-hoc information and syndicating it across the web.
If you know how to use Microsoft Word or equivalent, blogging will be second nature. Then, when you have new announcements or product releases, you can write a blog post that’s about the length of a longish email and post it using your blog.
Your blog will then ping dozens of sites that will take your new content and notify hundreds of other sites, making it available to their readers.
Unlike websites, blogs are born connected to other websites. They have software built-in that talks to other sites and gives worldwide (or hyperlocal) exposure to your content. With the right setup, your blog will even tell search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN when you’ve published new content. That way, you’re more likely to be included and it’ll happen more quickly.
Third, blogging is the great equalizer. A blog gives your business the opportunity to compete on equal footing with larger companies. Instead of competing based on ad budget, you can build a reputation for expertise by describing parts of the business that only a true expert or insider would know.
As your content gets more popular and receives links from other sites, you’ll organically appear higher and more frequently on search engines.
In this age of skepticism demanding transparency, there are no more faceless corporations. If you don’t put a face on your company, someone else will. And what that face becomes won’t be up to you.
So no matter how large or small your company, your blog posts will help prospects and customers get to know you as a company and connect on a more interpersonal level than they would necessarily with the traditional “faceless” corporation.
Your blog doesn’t have to get a lot of comments to be successful, I’ve spoken with many businesses worry about negative comments. When I ask whether they’d rather receive a negative comment on their blog so that they can respond, or a negative comment on a third-party site where that might not be an option, the answer was overwhelmingly one-sided. You can turn it into a positive and there are even cases where other customers chime in about how the complaint itself isn’t merited. Or exercise editorial control for egregious trolling.
Our next blog post talks about how blogs can be used with your current website and methods for building traffic to your web presence using traditional and social media.
Tags: Blogging, Lead Generation, Search Engines
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