Blogging is an excellent way to market your business on the internet. When it’s done properly, blogging is informative, authentic, and gives your customers an opportunity to interact with your business. It will boost your brand, your credibility, and your reputation - and it will also increase search engine traffic to your website.
Creating a blog for your business is surprisingly easy if you do it yourself, and inexpensive if you hire a professional to help you get started. However, before you dive head-first into creating a blog, here are some things to keep in mind:
Don’t be tempted by free blog options. Blogger, Wordpress.com, Blogspot, and Livejournal (to mention a few) are all excellent free blogging platforms that allow you to get a blog up and running in a matter of a few hours. Unfortunately, these free services don’t deliver nearly the same benefits as hosting your own blog on your own website. Here’s why:
- Credibility. Spammers (people who create questionable content of little value) often use free blogging services to promote themselves. Consequently, consumers often regard blogs hosted on free services as less credible.
- Less search engine traffic. Search engines don’t typically value free blogs as highly as self-hosted blogs, so they’re less likely to send visitors to a blog on a free host.
- Not as easy to customize. Free blog services limit how your blog can work and look. A self-hosted blog can match your company colors and the function of your main company website.
- Copyright issues. When you post to a blog on a free blog service, there is some question as to who owns the content. Blogger.com, for instance, lays claim to the rights to copy or reproduce your blog posts elsewhere.
As you can see, hosting your own blog really is the best way to go. We recommend using open-source software from Wordpress for most business blogs (which is different than hosting your blog on Wordpress.com). It’s fairly easy to setup, well-supported, and more than secure enough for most business blogging needs.
Once you’ve setup your blog, here are some other points to consider:
Allow everyone to comment. A lot of bloggers try and force people to register as a user before they can comment, but this is a mistake. If you want people to follow your blog and trust what you say, you have to encourage comments. Registration doesn’t encourage comments. The same goes for holding comments for moderation. While it’s not as bad as forcing registration, it often frustrates commentors. Moderation of comments should only take place if the comment contains more than one link, exceeds a certain length, or contains foul or offensive language. Most blogging platforms have the ability to hold these types of comments for moderation automatically.
Negative comments can be good. If you follow our advice and allow anonymous and unmoderated comments, someone could leave a negative comment and hurt your brand, product, or service - right? First of all, negative comments add authenticity to your blog. If you want consumers to trust you, you have to wither a little criticism. Secondly, as long as you respond properly, negative comments are an opportunity to reinforce your business, brand, and/or service. Of course, it’s important to note that you can always delete comments that don’t deserve a response.
Build a good blogroll. A blogroll, for those that don’t know, is a collection of links that a blogger recommends or finds useful. This list of links is often found on the main page of the blog. Make sure that your blogroll links to quality, useful sites. Doing so will boost your credibility with users, and - oddly enough - search engines will give you more credibility too.
Interested in creating a blog but not interested in doing it yourself? Please contact us to learn more about our blog creation services.
