Your website is in essence a shop window to the world but unless your particular line of business includes regular updates of new stock or frequently refreshed information it can lead to a certain ‘static’ feel for your online presence. This is bad news for your search engine optimisation strategy, your social media profile and ultimately the success of your business online.
So you’ve set up a blog for your business? Congratulations. But hang on; you’ve not updated it for three months. This is not good. In fact, having a badly maintained blog can be extremely counterproductive.
'90% of marketers believe that content marketing is set to become more important over the next year' - eConsultancy Survey
Whereas relatively ‘static’ content on a website can avoid looking out of date, a blog with entries whose latest entries are older than a few days can infer a lack of attention and business inactivity. To carry through the ‘shop window’ analogy, it can make your online enterprise look empty and uncared for.
Creating an Effective Business Blog
Having a blog makes it easy to create a kind of dialogue with customers and clients by ‘talking’ about things that might be slightly tangential to your actual business conversations, but which are on topic enough to be the equivalent of a friendly, informed chat from a member of sales staff on a shop floor.
The importance of social media such as Twitter and Facebook is now widely recognised, too, but here again the time and effort involved in making useful updates by which to keep a high profile with customers can be both time consuming and the content creation side of things demanding.
Create Blog Content to Promote via Social Media
A regularly updated blog makes it easy for you to follow through with relevant postings on your social networks - this can help draw clients in to visit your main website content.
Depending on the type of business you operate, a blog can be more personalised as an opinion piece along the lines of a newspaper editorial leader. This can be extremely effective if the services you offer are personality-led, as it allows you to let prospective customers ‘get to know’ a little bit more about you.
There are many ways to manage a blog simply and easily. Sites such as tumblr offer an accessible way to present multi-media content as well as giving the options of ‘time release’ postings, so that new input can be created in one session and ‘published’ on a set timetable throughout the week as separate items. Of course, one of the really useful tools for bloggers of all sizes is WordPress. WordPress is a great self-publishing blog platform – this website is infact built in wordpress.
How to Build a Good Business Blog
One of the hard parts about maintaining a blog is the time it takes to create good content. Many businesses recognise the need to blog and update their website regularly, but struggle with finding the time to do this constantly. This is where hiring the experts can be of real benefit. More: How to Outsource your Online Content Effectively
Using the services of an expert content agency is by far the best way to manage a business related blog. Topic specific content based around news items of interest to your market sector can be produced on a bespoke tailor-made basis, taking the time consuming effort involved off your hands. In addition, when you use the services of companies such as Search News Media, you can also tap into their expertise with guest posting and blogger outreach – proven ways to increase your blog and SEO profile.
