Are you blogging for your business? If not, you are missing out on a great way to promote, advertise and market your business for practically no money at all. In fact, you can blog for free, if you like.
When you begin blogging for your business on a regular basis, you are opening the door for your customers, clients, colleagues and prospects to enter into a conversation and get to know you.
Blogging began as an online journaling phenomenon, but it has evolved into a whole new animal. Many people do operate personal blogs, but blogging is a whole lot more than chit chat and diary secrets spilled to the world.
Your business blog is the perfect space to tell people who you are and what you are all about. Effective blogging can be the most powerful marketing tool you can create. There are blogging platforms out there that let you publish a blog for free, but if you are serious about building a blog to promote your business, you’ll want to invest a very small amount of cash.
If you already operate a website, you have the perfect home for your business blog. You can quite likely add a WordPress blog to your website with just a few clicks of your mouse in your site’s hosting navigation controls. If you don’t have a website for your business, beginning a blog is the fastest, easiest way to create a web presence for your business.
Don’t Have A Website?
First, go buy a domain name that reflects your business name, your service or your product. It costs less than $10 a year, so just do it. Then you need to find hosting for your blog. A server provides you with your virtual real estate – a place your domain can call home. You can find good, reliable hosting for under $10 a month, so it’s not a difficult expense, even for the smallest business. By investing this small of amount of money to host your own blog, you have the security of ownership without being at the risk of someone else’s business decisions.
Once you have your blog up and running, begin to do some market research to determine what words people are using when they search the Internet for your services or products. The Internet has several free keyword research tools that let you enter in a term and instantly find out how many people have searched for that term over the past month. Some will also suggest other popular keywords to use within your blog posts’ titles and content in order to increase your visibility in the search engine results pages displayed when people are searching on the web.
The primary way to gain visitor traffic to your blog, however, is by having quality content that is well written and easy to read. Share helpful information with your readers and even offer special incentives or contests for the readers of your blog.
Isn’t Blogging Complicated?
Blogging isn’t difficult and it doesn’t have to be scary. Just write with your own voice and treat your customers the way you know you should. Let them know you appreciate them and that they can depend on you to keep it 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 clients and prospects a way to get to know the owner behind the business and trust you. Creating and increasing trust is what will lead to potential buyers to do business with you.