Using your business blog to the best effect

A blog is for life, not just for Christmas. Many companies throughout the UK, and the rest of the world in fact, realise the importance of having a blog on their website but don’t utilise it fully. Unfortunately many blogs are being abandoned and neglected everyday and its often through no fault of their own.

All a blog requires is a chance to gain authority through regular updating and authoring from its owners. It’s like a pet dog; it requires regular walks and exercise to maintain its health, longevity and buoyancy.

We personally believe that all businesses large or small should have some form of blog attached to their website and act as a part of their core marketing practices. It’s quite simple, other than setting aside the time to write. If you own a business then hopefully you are passionate about what you do or sell…so therefore blog about it! Your thoughts, opinions, views, promotions, reviews and communications are interesting to potential and existing clients. Naturally shrouding your promotions in the relevant and useful information is the key; a blog is useless if all you write is the latest offers and sales you have on.

The No. 1 rule of writing is to write what you know. But in addition engaging your readers free and valuable information is the no.1 component to successful online marketing. Information is money. Its only cost is your time for a bit of research and writing but its rewards can easily far outweigh its cost as you engage with your users.

The more you write to more messages you send and eventually, if what you’re writing is interesting your readers will begin to spread the word through social networking. By creating trust with your readers they will reward you with respect in your relevant industry which can easily give you the competitive edge.

In addition to the customer benefits your blog can also help your search engine rankings. You will likely find your rankings improve as you link back to relevant sources within your own website. Relevant, regular and fresh content is a key metric used by the search engines and this is where your blog can become a powerful tool for your online marketing.

Here are some examples of what to write about in your blog, depending on your industry:

If you own a hair salon? Write blog posts about hair tips and tricks, healthy hair and the latest styles.

If you provide events? Blog about the hottest new activities for the season, what the benefits are to your clients business, theories and types of activities.

If you are a Designer? Blog about the latest technology in design, design tips and tricks, cool artwork and creative studies.

The art of good blogging is to make sure what you are writing is interesting, insightful and useful for your readers. The next step is to ensure what you are writing is done in a way which is readable and doesn’t bore your readers. Then once you have the core structure of your blog post feel free to every so often drop subtly hints about your offerings to persuade readers to pick up the phone.

If you don’t have a blog currently there are two primary resources that we use and feel are worthy of mention. The first is Blogger. Blogger is useful because you can access it using your Google login, it is free and can easily be integrated as a sub-domain of your primary domain. For example we use Blogger and the URL displays as http://blog.dsm-design.co.uk. There are useful widgets available and various free templates for use but support can be a bit limiting if you are unsure on what you’re doing.

The other platform available is WordPress which is another popular a free blogging platform. There are loads of support articles and some great themes available on resources such as ThemeForest. WordPress can either be used on their own servers with basic templates or for the full integration you can install it to your own server and have a huge amount of power over the customisation of your blog. Of course you can always ask your web design company to design and install a blog for you!

The image of your blog needs to be fun; the content of your blog needs to be fun and most of all you need to ensure your readers are having fun reading it. It should be insightful and worthy of a good read and possibly evoke a comical response.

Either way once your blog is ready for the world to see…make sure you promote it like none other. Link to it, tell your friends about it, get their friends to do the same and keep updating it…the more you put in to it the more it will reward you in the long term.

Have fun blogging!