Posted by Using a blog is an excellent way of increasing your business as it gives you more authenticity and helps trademark your business. You are no longer an anonymous entity – a blog adds a more personal touch and allows customers to familiarise themselves with you and your business, thereby increasing your own awareness and your customer base. Here are a few suggestions of how to use your blog to optimise your business.
1) Blogging can be both informative and amusing at the same time. People want to learn more about you as a person as well as your business, but only if it’s relative to their requirements – too much information can be a bad thing. Let’s imagine you have a business coaching stay-at-home mothers trying to start a business of their own. Your blog should offer ideas and strategies, as well as advice on ways to deal with the problems these mothers might face. You can introduce relevant stories to your blog, but blogging about mundane things such as what you had for lunch or what movie you saw last night is hardly going to be helpful to your customers. By all means be friendly and mix in stories, but ask yourself first whether they will benefit the reader and are relevant. If they’re not, then don’t include them.
2) Blog frequently. If a blog is updated frequently it helps attract readers and can therefore achieve a higher search engine ranking than your website. However,if you only blog occasionally, say monthly, then you are short-changing your readers who have subscribed and also yourself as the results of the search engine will suffer. When blogging you can write 30 postings in one go and then organise a schedule to release them over the next few weeks. There’s no need to write something every day, just find a schedule that suits you, but it should be at least weekly in order to profit your readers and the search engine results.
3) Make sure you establish links to your website. An advantage of the blog is that readers often land there instead of your website due to the way the search engine is optimised. In order to ensure that traffic is driven towards your web home page you need to have at least one link to it.
4) Be patient. You’re not going to establish a following overnight, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that your blog isn’t helping build up your business. Not everyone who reads blogs subscribes or writes comments, but if they’ve found the information helpful they may well buy from you.
5) Choose you blog host with care. There is a large choice of blogging hosts – wordpress, blogger, typepad & more. Make sure you compare the various features and functions each host offers before you sign up and start your blog. WordPress offers a number of SEO features, tagging, analytics etc and is very easy to use.
Finally, remember that blogging can help build your business in ways that may not seem obvious. You’ll get to learn your readers likes and dislikes by what they read and their comments. You’ll learn about their problems and how you can help solve them, thereby helping to build your business. There’s no doubt that blogging is an outstanding way of connecting with a wider audience and helping create traffic and sales.