Recharge Your Business with a Blog
Why? There’re simply so many benefits. If you want more visitors to your main business website, the addition of a blog can really help.
Of course you do have to be prepared to write frequent articles on your business topic. If you do though, you’ll be rewarded with interested visitors.
And that’s without mentioning what a blog can do to build your relationship with your customers.
A Blog Improves the Search Engine Ranking of Your Site
The search engines like web sites that are updated regularly. Your blog is updated whenever you post an article, and also whenever anyone comments on your blog.
So, What Works on a Business Blog?
Your blog must have great articles so I guess you’re worried about what to write?
You definitely need something your customers – and potential customers – want to read, Â bookmark, digg, stumble and comment on. For example:
- the best way to install your product (or service)
- how to choose the right model of your product
- a customer testimonial on how your product improved their life
- the best way to use your product
- the green benefits of your product
- a customer survey about what features to add to your product
- a customer survey about what problems your customers had with your product
You wll never be short of material: every interaction you have with your customers is material for another article.
How to Structure your Blog Post
Keep the article to around 5oo words and make sure you have at least one picture or video to create visual interest.
Break the article up into sections with headings and try and ensure the headings into the keywords for which your want your business to rank well for in the search engines.
Include links from your blog back to any relevant pages on your main site – perhaps a specific product, making sure that the link text (the visible text on the link) is a good keyword rich description of the product.
You Can Easily Update your Blog – No Need to Wait for your Webmaster
Writing a blog post is easy. The only fiddly bit is uploading and aligning any pictures or videos. However, once this is mastered then it’s full speed ahead. You don’t need to get your webmaster involved for you to update your site.
Build Relationships with your Customers Using Your Blog
A blog is great way to get feedback from your customers or potential customers.
The blog is specifically designed for people to comment, but beyond this you can add customer surveys and also contact forms.
You can extend the blog so your customers can write guest posts (subject to your approval) which could include testimonals, case studies, etc.
If you can have your customers provide content for your web site you are definititely on to a winner.
Revitalize Your Main Site
Using the blog’s syndication features you can pipe content from your blog onto the home page of your main site. This use’s the blog’s built in RSS feed will typically take the form of headlines or excepts.
This makes your main site more interesting with changing content and drives visitors to your blog.
If your blog posts are interesting then you will get customer feedback through comments or visitors following internal links back to the ‘buy’ pages on your main site.
Not Having a Blog is a Missed Opportunity
If you can find a reason not to have a business blog please let me know.
I can’t think of easier and cheaper way to increase traffic to a business site and solicit customer feedback.