Traditionally blogging was seen as the online voice of individuals, but has since evolved to become a powerful communications channel for businesses.
Business owners crave good content, opinions, interpretation, examples, predictions on industry trends or any information that puts them ahead of the competition. Blogging is now about taking face-to-face conversations online and is more aligned to what commerce is all about – learning and sharing new ideas.
The benefits of blogging for you business becomes evident in the following ways:
You become the primary source
Having a blog means you control what news gets sent out. It’s likened to the online version of the young newspaper seller saying: “extra extra, read all about it”. You now have a place online where you can guarantee people that they are getting up to date news and you can say “you heard it here first”. Adding to that, it allows you to not only push out good publicity, but also gives you a solid forum to manage a reputation crisis. It becomes the official source of information for your site.
Talk WITH your readers, not TO your readers
The difference between having a website and a blog is that your website talks to your customers, but your blog talks with them instead. Therefore, you have an interactive forum to address your clients and listen to them.
Using the quality feedback
When you invite people to talk about your business you are gaining valuable insight and opinions for free. It is important to take note of what your customers are saying about your business. The way you react to that insight is what will help your business improve.
Since you already have customers to talk to, your blog will allow you to identify who your most passionate followers of your particular industry are. This becomes a perfect way to then address those customers who you know are both interested and loyal to your business.
Establish yourself
It is important to remember that when you create a blog, you position yourself as an expert source of news for whatever topic you are writing about. Therefore you need to ensure that the content you are producing is relevant and informative. The old saying of ‘content is king’ applies even more so with B2B blogging as you need to show value to your readers so that they become loyal visitors to your site.
Networking with industry peers
Hosting a blog for your business provides you with a forum to communicate with other bloggers and businesses in your industry. By networking online you build relationships and gain links from other industry leaders which helps you increase your ranking too.
Increase traffic
A good blog manager needs to have the fundamentals of SEO in mind, they should know about keyword density and know how to generate more clicks to your website as more clicks results in more leads. The more visitors you get to site, the more popular it becomes and your business will further be positioned as a leader in the industry.
There are over 100 000 blogs being setup on a daily basis, most of them being linked to business in some way. Blogs are a brilliant way of distributing your company’s expertise and an economical option for building a strong online presence.
