MediaVidea

How to use blogs for your business

A blog is an easy-to-update web site. A regularly updated blog helps you develop rich two-way dialogues with your stakeholders – customers, suppliers, retailers, investors, and other constituents.

Having a constantly updated blog reduces dependency on press releases – the company blog enables you to talk about new developments and then listen to people give inputs through comments or emails.

If yours is a one-person startup, get a free blog on blogger.com, wordpress.com and many others and start a conversation about your company, what it does and so on.

If you have used an online email account at gmail.com, yahoo.com or others and know how to use the basic formatting features in Microsoft Word, you will take up blogging without 30 minutes.

Many studies about usage of web 2.0 tools such as blogs in companies noticed that most companies do not trust their employees, fearing about the nature of information they might put online.

One solution is to find someone is the marketing department, who can actually write, trusting her/him to cover the latest developments in the company.

Common Topics for your company blog:

1. Information about new products and services
2. Changes/modifications to products & services, company policies, etc
3. Company events: the calendar of events, topics for events, etc
4. Looking for partners, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers
5. Run contests, polls, quizzes to generate user leads
6. Job postings: getting response in comments
7. Informing the public about emergencies: For example, the CEO can talk about the mess at the recent trade event.
8. Satisfaction surveys
9. Asking customers for suggestions about what to put upcoming products/services
10. Presenting the so-called human face to your company: writing about company outings, reaching key milestones (1000th customer), new hires, those who are leaving, etc

A constantly updated blog can bring more search traffic. You can route this traffic to your main site where you sell your wares.

Having a blog reduces your dependency on Public Relation agencies, dedicated webmaster, among other things. Once you start blogging, you go on to learn how to extract more value from your online presence. There is a wealth of information on blogging-related activities online.

Best practices for your company blog:
1. First and foremost, No fluff. Only data.
Be to the point. Write for your users not for yourself. The online user may be more informed and can get through your B.S. For your reader’s sake, do not bore them to close the browser window by using flowery language resembling a communiqué from the government press service.

2. Track usage of your blog by using freely available services such as statcounter.com, sitemeter.com – tracking how many people accesses you site today, from which country, most popular pages, frequent refers, etc.

3. Easily accessible useful links: RSS feed for your blog, Detailed ‘About” category, E-mail ID, etc.

4. Learn from the best company blogs: Start with the official Google blog. Read it from start to end. Observe the wide breadth of Google-related topics it covers. Observe the simplicity and directness of presentation.

Labels: blogging

posted by Pramit Singh @ 4:59 PM