A blog is an excellent way to build brand awareness for any sized business, especially a small business. Keeping a simple and basic theme is the key; you need to focus on the audience that you want reading your blog.
Your blog should focus on providing information that is helpful and useful to your readers, using simple tactics to expose your products and services. Give link love; don’t be afraid to link out to other blogs or websites even if they are competitors to some degree. You also want to deep link back to older blog posts and if you have a website, link back to it with relevant anchor text.
Here is the hard part, keep your blog update and fresh with posts daily, your readers will not stay faithful if your posts are not current and updated often. Search engines like Google and Yahoo love to see your website or blog updated often, this brings their spiders back to index your site increasing your chances of getting to the top of the search engines.
Be sure you have an RSS feed readily available for your readers, this gives your readers instant updates whenever you write a new post on your blog. You should always respond to comments posted by your readers, this gives your readers a sense of confidence knowing that a real person is behind the blog.
You should keep up to date with news that is happening in your industry so you can quickly post about it. Using Google Adsense is a great way to monetize your site, you have to face the facts not everyone that visits your site will buy or use your services. You therefore need to make money from those leaving your site; Google Adsense is the perfect avenue.
You can also use affiliate programs that compliment your business, using resources like Blogging to the Bank will help give you ideas to capitalize on other money generating sources for your blog.
I use WordPress for all my blogs, it is one of the most popular and easy to use programs offered to bloggers. You can use the free version, but I suggest you register a domain name and use the version that comes with your hosting packages, SiteGround hosting has been my preferred hosting service and GoDaddy.com is my preferred domain registrar.
To recap, here are some of the main reasons you should start a blog for your small business:
1. A blog is a very inexpensive way to market your business online, building your brand and creating a portal for your customers to gain information about your products and services.
2. Blogs offer immediate customer feedback; you can react to positive or negative feed back in a very timely matter.
3. Blogs are easier and less costly to manage that a full blown website and if used properly can be even more effective than a regular old website.
4. Blogs open the doors to new business and relationship with other like business not readily available with norm offline marketing avenues.
Although you can start a blog for free, I highly recommend using a paid version. You can start a blog for under $100 per year and the return can be priceless if you choose to aggressively keep your blog fresh.
Tim Somers
Bizarre Promotions, Inc.
I’ve been blogging for a few years now, my blog gets more traffic than my main website – I post everyother day – and only update my website monthly.