Use a Blog to Improve your Business
One question I have been asked recently was what would a blog bring to my business. Every website has an ‘about us’ page and these can be quite unfriendly and don’t really give customers or clients a true picture of what you and your company is really all about.
Here is a scenario for a web hosting company:
Creating an online reception desk
What a blog will do is give customers an opportunity to ask questions, and you can create discussions which can give potential customers confidence in your service because you appear to know what you are talking about.
Improve communication
As a hosting company it’s important that you communicate server issues and potential down-times with your customers, so creating a blog can be used to communicate with customers.
Feedburner offers a free email newsletter service, where people can subscribe and when you post on your blog the subscriber receives notification of the post on your blog.
Promote your services
As a hosting company you might want to inform customers of a new service you are offering. Maybe you are offering dedicated servers and want to tell your customers about this – blogs are also great ways of promoting your business on the search engines too. My travel blog receives over 2,000 uniques a day, so imagine all those potential customers.
Write Articles
You get a lot of support calls about uploading files to the customer’s web space, so write a blog post which customers can read at their leisure, and this cuts down the amount of support calls.
These are just some examples of how a blog can be used to help you run and market your business – I’ve given the example of a web hosting company, but these examples could be used for just about every business.
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Filed under: Business Of Blogging on March 19th, 2007
These are great ideas. I manage over a dozen websites (in my day job) and constantly hear “I don’t have time to create fresh content.†It does take a little extra time, but aren’t customers worth it?
Fresh content is vital for so many reasons. You only have to look on del.icio.us the amount of links that point to content and not to the homepage.
People link to content that they enjoy reading, that they think will be useful to their readers, or that will help them in their job.
If you don’t already create a del.icio.us account, and promote it on your blog. People will add your content to the del.icio.us site [or their own site]
The benefits far out weigh the negatives of time restraints etc.
It also improves your business personal, your business gets ‘free’ advertising and you get a greater client pool…
I always try and sell blog or blog capabilities (news etc) to my clients