Should You Blog in Your Business?

Should You Blog in Your Business?

Although blogging did not begin as a business pursuit, it did not take the business sector very long to begin using blogs in a commercial manner. Some businesses first became aware of blogging because they discovered an employee"s personal blog had commented on their company or other employees, or they discovered an employee using company time to write to their personal blog. In these cases, the company learned about blogs, but the employees usually lost their jobs. Because of these experiences and the resulting publicity surrounding some especially high-profile cases, more and more businesses have learned about the potential power of blogging as a marketing tool.

As a business owner, you may wonder if you should jump into the blogosphere and begin a company blog or not? There are, as with all business decisions, many things to consider. Here are 10 facts or ideas about business blogging that may help you make up your mind whether a business blog should be something that you should try.

Business blogging is rapidly spreading throughout companies with an online presence. This applies not just to IT-related companies such as search engines like Google (which has innumerable employees all blogging merrily away about the latest and the greatest at Google), but also to other companies that sell everyday products. Every company, even the smallest, with any Internet presence should at least consider the idea of starting a company blog while the genre is still so popular.

A great example is the Tinbasher Blog, which is a blog written by the owner of a small sheet metal company in England. This blog has become very popular, however, because the blog usually showcases the part of its business that will appeal to the average Internet reader, not necessarily its large customers who buy huge amounts of sheet metal products (other advertising sources may work better there). Their target audience, as any business blog"s should be, is the end-user and usually an individual.

By chance or design, The Tinbasher Blog is widely referred to by other blogs who comment on their cool consumer items (like metal soccer balls/footballs, plant holders, etc.), and since these other blogs are read by people in many different parts of the world, this small British company is selling its products to markets it could never afford to penetrate by traditional advertising means They may not be making a billion dollars, but sales are up and visits to their website are up. If you are a small business, you can"t afford to buy this type of worldwide publicity, yet they get it via a blog that costs them very little to produce. The key is that it is a successful blog - that"s the difficult part about company blogging - it has to be done right or it really is a waste of time.

Blogging software and even webspace for your company"s blog may be free, but even if you choose not to have your blog on your website to save money, you still need an employee to write the blog. It is vital that you chose someone who knows your company"s purpose for the blog and what tone you wish you set. Business blogs that are successful have a feel of casualness to them that is not forced - they don"t read as if they are an advertisement for your company, but more like the day-to-day life of your company.

Finding the right person to write your blog is often the most difficult part of business blogging. They must have the knowledge (or access to it) of almost everything about your company, be able to write coherently, and be able to add that almost indefinable something that makes a blog different from an advertisement. In a small organization, in particular, often the CEO or founder becomes the blogger, if only because they know everything that has happened to their company and assuming they have been successful so far, they know something about how to be persuasive in selling products/services without necessarily being very obvious about it.

If your company is large and has many different departments or divisions, consider multiple bloggers. Each one will present a different view of the company from their angle and provide more variety for the readers of your company"s blog. You may have one blog and still have many different people contribute to it. Just be very careful about who you choose to blog for your company - they must be able to write, but they must also WANT to do this job of blogging because the basic nature of a blog"s success is the degree of passion that is put into it. Without dedication and passion for your business blog, your bloggers will not succeed in bringing more exposure of your company to the online community.

Don"t start a company blog unless you are willing to be completely honest when writing it. You must be prepared to own up to any mistake your company may have made and try your best to do damage control via your blog. Actually, blogs are great places for damage control, precisely because they have more of a personal feel to them.

If a business apologizes for a mistake they made in their company"s blog, and demonstrates their commitment to customer service in that blog entry, this can go a long way towards repairing the damage that mistake may have caused in your clients" eyes. It"s about appearances - you seem more like a person than some impersonal corporation in a company blog, and most clients appreciate the personal touch and will forgive a lot if they feel they have been dealt with fairly and, most importantly, honestly.

Company blogs are a great way to answer questions you may receive from potential or actual customers through your regular email process. By putting the question and answer in your blog, you are now generating the information out to potentially huge numbers of potential or actual clients, instead of just that one person who wrote in.

It looks even better if someone writes you an email with a suggestion to improve your service, you decide to follow his or her suggestion, and then talk about it in your blog. Otherwise, it may be more difficult for your clients to know that you have instituted what might be too small a change to advertise, but that might make a difference to them as well in terms of how they feel about your company.

Think carefully before you decide to allow comments to your blog entries. When you have a company blog, by allowing comments, you will encourage people to ask you questions and make comments that may be helpful, but you will also find that people post derogatory comments or ask questions that are difficult for you to answer, because of internal company policies. However, if you don"t respond to comments, you will be criticized for not doing so.

Keep in mind that a blog entry doesn"t have a specified length. Even company blogs can have individual entries as short as a sentence or as long as an article. You can include links to other blogs, articles, pages in your website, or any other place on the Internet to illustrate a point rather than write at length about it. In fact, the most interesting blogs seem to be the ones that vary in length - sometimes they have longer entries and other times just short entries - plus this gives your company blog the appearance of a personal touch. Blogs originated as a sort of online personal journal, and personal journals rarely have entries that are approximately equal in length each and every time.

However, if you do decide to start a company blog, be sure to make entries frequently. There is no requirement that you make an entry every day, but don"t let too long go between entries. In fact, with company blogs especially, some readers expect some kind of "schedule" because the originators are a business. Readers may expect to see an entry every second day or every third day or whatever.

If you do set up an informal schedule, and find that on a day you are supposed to make a blog entry that you either can"t or have nothing to say, make an entry that is a generic comment on the local weather or some other inane remark and leave it at that. The important thing is to keep to your informal schedule if you set one up so as to not disappoint regular readers.

Varying the length of your entries can make a blog with a time schedule for entries appear not to have one, especially if some of the short entries consist merely of personal remarks by the blogger on an uncontroversial topic or a short anecdote about something that happened today that doesn"t reflect badly on the company or its competitors (or anyone at all).

If you are a small company, you might want to consider making a company blog the highlight and center of your website. This really only works well if you are a company that serves a local customer market, rather than appealing to a regional or national/international market.

Prime examples are restaurants that are not chain restaurants. Sometimes adding a blog and making it your website is what will bring more customers to your establishment. The personal nature of blogs allows you to persuade the viewer that your restaurant is THE place to go, and so sometimes you feel freer to express yourselves and the personality of your business via the blog. Of course on your website you would also include information about where you are, what you are, your hours, your services/products, etc., but this information typically does not take up a lot of room for a smaller establishment, leaving space for the blog to be the centerpiece that draws it all together.

Finally, if you are thinking about adding a blog to your company, never forget that it is just another business tool. As much fun as blogging can be, once it is tied to your company, it reflects your company"s image and your company will be judged by the quality of your blog as well as the quality of your services/products. Plan a blog carefully, put the right person in charge of blogging, ensure that it sends out the message you want it to send, and with any luck, word will spread and you will see more traffic to your website.

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The search engines do index blogs as well as websites, so it will show up in search results and people will find it on their own or on the recommendation of others. Give it a little time to get its roots planted in the Internet and it should bring more traffic and more sales. If it doesn"t or if you can"t get the equation quite right, don"t be afraid to stop blogging. A bad blog can hurt a business just as easily as a good blog can help a business.

There are many other aspects of company blogging that could be brought up, but the above points are among the most important to keep in mind if you are even thinking of starting a company blog. A company blog is a large undertaking, because it is a commitment that you must consistently keep up with if you wish it to work as a marketing tool for your company. Company blogs fit some corporations better than others, but small businesses are especially good candidates for blogging if they already have someone on the payroll who they are willing to allow the time to do a good job on a company blog and who wants to do it and is capable of producing good material. If those three conditions exist, consider giving a company blog a try and see if it brings more interest in your company from others online.

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