5 Reasons on Why You Should Blog for Your Business

I went to the Business Blogging Summit last year in San Francisco, and boy did I get religion. In my mind, blogging was for people to basically publish a personal diary, not for business.

Wow was I wrong. Business blogging is exploding. After this conference I set out to do a test. Without disrupting anyone in the company, my "pet project" was to launch a blog and make it successful. I talked to a few friends, Dave Pell, who has been blogging for years, and his wife Gina, CEO of Splendora, who blogs on her site regularly. They are crazy about it as am I now. I got some great pointers.

I set up my Typepad account and off I went. It's about $12/month and no engineering needed. Perfect.

What did I learn? A lot. Here are some reasons why I've found that blogging for business not only works, but is necessary.

1. The Voice of the Business - Do you really know what the leader of the company you do business with is thinking? What they go through? What is important to them? What type of person they are? Do you usually have the ability to tap into their expertise? What's going on in the company? More often than not you never get this type of insight. And hey, some CEO's don't want to put themselves out there for people to publicly chat with. I get it – It's a lot of work. But if you want your voice to be that of the company, there's no better way than a blog.

2. Comment Consolidation - What a time-saver. If one of your readers has a question, chances are others have it too. What better way to answer it than in one place where everyone can see and hopefully benefit.

3. Customer Interaction - Not only do I love to interact with our own users but when they comment and others start to comment on the comment, it's the best thing for everyone. This is exactly what any blogger would want.  I don't have all the answers, so I try to encourage customer experts to comment and pitch in on ideas. What might work great in one industry, might actually do well in others.

4. Traffic Driver - We get about 160+ visitors to the blog a day. When when we combine it with our email marketing newsletter we get thousands. It also drives traffic from the search engines as another source, and gets picked up by other blogs that find the posts interesting.

5. RSS Feeds - Some people like to get their information with RSS feeds. It's easy with a blog, they'll sign up for your feed and get it realtime right in their reader.

That's the experience we've had here with blogs and it's only getting better. I'll blog about a "how-to" coming up, so stay tuned. Got any experiences of your own you'd like to share? Comment and prove me right!

Comments

[Krista Goon]

Hi,
Yes, more businesses should take up blogging but it only happens if the business owners are proactive enough, has something interesting to blog, can spend time blogging, knows why he or she needs to blog and has the ability to communicate properly (in most cases, this would be English). In Malaysia where I am, blogging has yet to take off in a big way due to the factors above. Plus NOT everyone can write well. Besides, it appeals to small business owners who understand the power of the Internet and not corporate bigwigs who still feel that these tasks are more suitable for the corporate communications or PR departments to handle. My two cents from a Malaysian perspective.

[Ann Hawkins]

I used to write great e-mails to my list & get great responses back but after they were read they were gone. Now I put it all on our Inspirational Speakers blog & all the posts & comments are there for anyone to read, plus lots of lovely links. I like the idea of linking the blog to our newsletter - I'll have to look into that. To answer one of the previous comments, it's not a personal blog but it's not really selling anything either - it's about our events & what we all learn from each other. I use the simplest free version & it's really easy & very effective.

[Karl Philip Lund]

Very interesting. So good that I translated your posting to Norwegian. So for all Norwegian speaking people you can read the posting here:
http://philiplund.blogspot.com/2006/08/hvorfor-alle-bedriftsledere-br-blogge.html

I've added some stuff, but it's basically the same thoughts.

Thanks for a great blog:)

[Tom Gray]

Great post, great reasons and, as JouJou states, "just scratching the surface..." One additon to your 3rd point that I'd like to make concerns the fact that most blogs(like this one) give their author an opportunity to moderate a user's comments and remove or block those they don’t want posted.

My advice? Be careful with this power. Unless a comment is down right mean-spirited, nasty or profane then let ‘em rip you. You’ll quickly find out - from other reader’s comments - whether they're just spitting out sour grapes or there’s a real issue you need to address.

[Rich]

Why would one pay $12/month (type pad) for a blog when there are so many blogs at no fee.

Thanks

[JOUJOU DE PARIS]

There is something about blogs - even for me - which is not very clear. I think, in the end, the goal of a professional blog is to sell something. On the other hand, if you say, "welcome to my blog, I will sell you something..." it will surely attract less people. So in the end, if we want to improve this media, we should be less greedy... By the way, I sell my jewelery on: http://www.joujoudeparis.fr. There is one called the Magic Whistle in massive silver that really whistles.

[Eric Standlee]

Blog on!
I believe you have just scratched the surface of the value of blogging. To me, here are the others you might have missed:

o counteract negative public opinion

No matter who you are, when you get important enough there are those who want to tell the world how wrong you are. Don't respond to these usually anonymous complaints or outright slanderous complaints in their forums. It only serves to add to the frenzie and they'll just slam you more. Instead, speak to the issues behind the complaints and remarks on your own blog or a special blog just about these sorts of issues. Your blog will show up next to their forum in the searches and if you drive the popularity of your positive voice, you will push down their forums in the rankings.

o I use a subscription form on my blog http://crusaderx.blogspot.com which allows my readers to get my blog in their email. Not all of my subscribers do so, so I also use the same provider feedburner for my feed so that I can track more accurately all of my subscriptions.

o I also have a regular newsletter tied to one of my blogs so that when I blog it gets sent to my subscribers.

You cannot do anything above with static websites.

o Finally, you get faster and better inclusion into the search engines when your site has rss and regularly new content.

There's my two cents.