So you’ve got a company website, a Facebook page and you’ve been Tweeting like mad, but now somebody’s told you that you should start a business blog too. While it may seem like overkill to have yet another ‘online presence’, blogging is actually an incredibly useful way to develop your branding and increase traffic to your website.
It’s Not All About You
Traffic
Search engines, such as Google, have a tendency to ‘like’ websites that are frequently updated with original content. Put simply, a blog is a great way of keeping the content on your site fresh. Also, every new blog post creates new opportunities for your site to be ranked in searches, which will hopefully lead to more people visiting it. A good way to encourage this is by giving each blog post a simple, relevant title that reflects a popular search term for your industry.
Your traffic can increase when people link to your blog. A person who finds your post particularly useful might choose to share it somewhere, for example on Twitter, or even their own blog, which could then lead to several more people visiting your post and sharing it themselves. You also have the option of posting links across your own social networks, encouraging the people who have already shown an interest in your business by choosing to ‘follow’ or ‘Like’ you, to visit the blog too.
Show That You’re Human
One of the reasons why many businesses choose to blog is to show their human side. The majority of your website is probably more focused around your business so it’s great to be able to show clients that actually, there is a human somewhere behind all that corporate stuff. A blog is informal, so you can express opinions, give advice and even show your sense of humour! All of these things help to develop a relationship with your customers (and potential customers) and give you more of a brand identity.
Similarly to Facebook and Twitter, you can also use your blog as a great tool for interacting with customers by encouraging them to comment on posts. This can lead to discussions, which will keep readers returning to the blog. Reader comments are also very useful for feedback and can give you some ideas for future posts – if a particular post has received a lot of positive comments, maybe this is a subject that you should write about again in the future, or maybe you could start a series of posts related to a similar topic.
The prospect of starting a blog may seem daunting but ultimately, it’s quite simple. Post about what you know, keep your content interesting and relevant and don’t be afraid to show some personality! Updates can be as frequent as you want; obviously we don’t all have the time to post daily, but it’s usually good to aim for one or two new posts per week. If you really don’t know where to start, take a look at some of the case studies below to get an idea of how other businesses engage with their customers through blogging.
Have you come across a really strong business blog? What did you like about it? Comment below to tell us!
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