Marketing Your Business With a Blog | How-to Guides for running your business from Business.com

A blog for your company generates new customers, keeps your customers informed of new products and promotions, associates your brand with your specialized niche in the marketplace, and creates an opportunity for fantastic customer service. What you must know about marketing your business with a blog:

Blogs cost almost nothing in terms of dollars and are arguably the most cost-effective weapon of advertising today in terms of return on investment.
Blogs create customers by introducing them to your company, and then by building a long-term relationship with them.
Effective business blogging can be achieved in as little as 15 minutes per day.

Follow these steps to marketing your business through a blog:

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Create a blog that looks professional

A professional-looking blog reflects positively on your company in the same way that quality advertising, letterhead, or good customer service does. Most blogging platforms provide templates that allow you to choose the colors on your blog, change some formatting, and add your company logo.

I recommend: Visit the blogs highlighted at Small Business Blog of the Day to see how others have successfully used various formats. Visit Typepad and Wordpress, the two dominant business blogging platforms, to see the various options they provide for layout and management of your blog.

Add content to your blog

The heart of a blog is the content. Most good blogs have hundreds of posts containing useful information relating to their chosen area of expertise. Your area of expertise is your company and the market it serves. The more posts about your company and its market that you write, the more your customers will get to know you on a personal basis, the foundation of a strong relationship.

I recommend: Start your blog with posts about your products, your services, your employees, and your customers. Make these posts personal and detailed. Use humor whenever possible. Take a look at how Hamakua Springs Farms started their blog (scroll to the bottom of the page to see their first posts).

Write posts about your niche to establish your company as the

Writing about your company's area of expertise makes your company the expert. When something new happens in your field and your readers discover this new information from you, they see you as an authority.

I recommend: Write articles on what you know in your field. You can write them from what you know off the top of your head, or find items other people have written and respond and/or build on their thoughts. To find out what other people are writing in your field, use Google News to find recent news items and Technorati to find what other bloggers are writing.

Make it easy for readers to buy your product or service

Provide obvious links on your blog to the sales section of your website. If a post is about one of your products, make sure it is linked directly to the sales page. There should be a prominent link to the company store at the top of the page that lets readers know you have something to sell and this is where to find it.

I recommend: Create a prominent link to your products or services. Two blogs that do this well include Glassy Baby candle holders and Isle of Eriska Hotel.

When writing your blog, practice exceptional customer service

Remember that once you write something on your blog it's on the Internet forever. Even if you delete it later, it is likely someone has already copy-and-pasted it on their website, so get it right the first time. Use spell check, be courteous, and show humility. Treat readers who comment on your posts as you would if they were customers standing right in front of you.

I recommend: Don’t preach to customers, inform them. Green Cine Daily does a great job of this by simply reviewing each of the movies it offers to customers. They don't urge you to buy their service with every post, they simply inform their customers.

Tips & Tactics
Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

Write a new post at least 2-3 times a week. Search engines love active websites, and this rate of posts will attract high search engine rankings within a couple of months.
Write a strong headline for each of your posts. A headline that plainly tells the reader what the post contains are read more often and are much more likely to be indexed by search engines.
Place photos in your posts as often as possible. Photos, like headlines, instantly attract readers who are browsing your blog.
Allow readers to comment on your posts. This two-way feedback allows you to find out what others think about your thoughts, your products or your company. Don't make the mistake of turning this option off for fear of negative comments. Remember, negative comments about your company will appear on the internet whether or not it's on your blog, but if it is on your blog, at least you know about it and can write a response that displays excellent customer service.
Use formatting that grabs the attention of the reader. Use bullets and numbered lists, bold, italic and indenting to highlight text.
When referencing another website, link to it so the reader can easily find exactly what your comments are referring to.
Use common blog design that includes a search box, archives-by-month, archives-by-category, a link to an 'about' page, a link to a 'contact' page, and a link to the blog’s RSS feed.
Each post should include the author's name, the date the post was written, a "permalink", and a link to the comments about the post.

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