Business Blogging 101

For those who aren’t familiar with the term Blog, Wikipedia defines it as, “A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website. A corporate weblog is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals.”

The advantage of blogs is that posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads.

Currently, all major browsers support RSS technology, which allows readers to easily read recent posts without actually visiting the blog, which is very useful for low-volume blogs. 

Stated simply, a blog is an online journal. Most blog posts are short and anyone reading them can post comments for the blogger.

Types of Blogs

• Internal Blogs – an internal blog, generally accessed through the corporation's Intranet, is a weblog that any employee can view. Internal blogs may be used in lieu of meetings and e-mail discussions, and can be especially useful when the people involved are in different locations, or have conflicting schedules
• External Blogs – An external blog is a publicly available weblog where company employees, teams, or spokespersons share their views. It is often used to announce new products and services (or the end of old products), to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues.
• CEO Blogs – although there are debates on whether CEOs should blog or not, blogging among CEOs is becoming popular.
• Personal Blogs – a combination of personal opinions, thoughts, promotion and links to useful content.

Advantages of Blogging

• Blogging is a low-cost alternative to having a full-blown corporate website. For small business owners who don’t want to spend the money to hire a professional web designer or learn HTML software, blogging offers an inexpensive method for maintaining a web presence.
• Most blogging programs are easy to use right out of the box. Companies like: Movable Type.org, Blogger.com and Wordpress.org all offer easy blogging tools to get started and they are free. NOTE: Customizing these to get your own unique presence can become complicated.
• Updating a blog is easy because it is similar to using a standard word processing program like Word.
• Maintaining a blog is a much quicker process than contacting a web designer with changes or doing the coding and uploading yourself.
• Business blogs provide your small business with a chance to share your expertise and knowledge with a much larger audience without spending money on marketing. This is a powerful benefit for consultants and coaches.

Examples of  Some Industrial Blogs

• The Marketing Maven from Globalspec.com – The Marketing Maven Blog offers news, research and analysis, designed for industrial sales and marketing professionals interested in the latest trends in online marketing.
• Industrial Market Trends from Thomasnet.com – Industrial Market Trends, a comprehensive, daily industrial blog with a bi-weekly newsletter, publishes the latest industrial developments, best practices, market trends and opinions of our editors and readers. We welcome all our readers to post their opinions on any of our articles.
• Operation Green – Insights on sustainability and green technology for manufacturers.
• ShopFloor – Blog from the National Association of Manufacturers.
• The Edge Blog – A discussion of business and technology issues critical to manufacturers
• Industrial Marcom Blog – (Ahem, mine)

Five Ways to Become a Better Blogger

Blogging is a simple process but is a lot of work. While it is not hard to post to your blog, getting the traffic or leads and/or revenue from your blog is much tougher. Maybe you’ve been blogging for a while and still aren’t seeing the volume of traffic you’d like. Here are five ways that you can improve your blogging skills.

1. Keep up with the times. No one wants to read last month’s news. Some important issues stay in the headlines for months but your audience will want fresh updates on those topics. Knowing what is going on around you and what will interest others will make your blog content worth reading.
2. Change your content often. There is nothing worse than losing traffic you’ve worked hard to attract because you don’t update your posts regularly.  Readers like fresh content and they will go where they can get it.
3. Network with others. Register with search engines and join social bookmarking sites like Technorati and Digg so people can see what you are doing. Share your blog address with followers on Twitter and on your profile on Facebook.
4. Pay attention to your readers. When people comment, they would like you to answer them back. Take the time to talk to them. After all, they took the time to visit and post a comment. Their comments can drive the direction your blog takes in the future if you want to keep them as readers and increase your traffic.
5. Keep self-promotion to a minimum. It is not all about you; it should be about what you can do for your readership. Keep promotional copy about your products, services and yourself to a minimum. You want your content to be the main attraction. If the ads coordinate with your blog niche, that’s good but show only a few and at the top of the page if you want them to be clicked regularly by visitors.

Blogging is an art. Creating interesting content and keeping readers coming back is a job. If you already blog, use these five tips to enhance your value to the blogosphere.

Resources

• The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right
• Debbie Weil – The Corporate Blogging Consultant
• Writing a Good Business Blog - For Dummies

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