Blog to build your business
Are you blogging for your business? Otherwise, you’re missing out on a great way to promote, advertise, and market your business for virtually no money. In fact, you can blog for free, if you want.
When you start blogging for your business on a regular basis, you’re opening the door for your customers, colleagues, and prospects to strike up a conversation and get to know you.
Blogging started out as an online journal phenomenon, but it’s grown into a whole new animal. Many people run personal blogs, but blogs are about much more than chatter and diary secrets revealed to the world.
Your business blog is the perfect space to tell people who you are and what you are about. Effective blogs can be the most powerful marketing tool you can create. There are blogging platforms that allow you to blog for free, but if you’re serious about creating a blog to promote your business, you’ll want to invest a very small amount of money.
If you already operate a website, you have the perfect home for your business blog. There’s a good chance you can add a WordPress blog to your website with just a few mouse clicks on your site’s hosting navigation controls. If you don’t have a website for your business, starting a blog is the fastest and easiest way to create a web presence for your business.
Don’t have a website?
First, buy a domain name that reflects the name of your company, your service, or your product. It costs less than $10 a year, so go for it. Then you need to find hosting for your blog. A server provides you with your virtual property, a place your domain can call home. You can find good, reliable hosting for less than $10 a month, so it’s not a difficult expense, even for the smallest of businesses. By investing this small amount of money to host your own blog, you are assured of ownership without risking someone else’s business decisions.
Once you have your blog up and running, start doing market research to determine what words people are using when searching for your services or products on the internet. The internet has several free keyword research tools that allow you to enter a term and instantly find out how many people have searched for that term in the last month. Some will also suggest other popular keywords to use in your blog post titles and content to increase your visibility in the search engine results pages displayed when people search the web.
However, the main way to get visitor traffic to your blog is to have quality content that is well written and easy to read. Share useful information with your readers and even offer special incentives or contests for your blog readers.
Isn’t blogging complicated?
Blogging isn’t difficult and it doesn’t have to be scary. Just write in your own voice and treat your customers the way you know you should. Let them know that you appreciate them and that they can rely on you to keep things real, share good ideas, and interact with them on a regular basis. If writing isn’t your thing, you can always hire a good freelancer to write your blog posts for a reasonable fee.
Blogging is a great way to market and promote your business. It gives your current and potential customers a way to get to know the owner behind the business and trust you. Building and increasing trust is what will drive potential buyers to do business with you.