Blog Marketing for Business Owners

There are thousands of blogs covering all sorts of common interests and topics. Blogs tend to be organised according to particular topics such as celebrities, fan clubs, artists, political discussion and so on. Blogs are a great way to encourage user loyalty and provide a sense of freshness. They are also a source of considerable controversy (which in turn stimulates more postings by other users with opposing views). Searchbots love fresh content. So the more topical and unique a blog post, the faster searchbots will come back to check if anything new has been posted recently.

Blogs tend to be highly unstructured and have a personal diary writing style. They are mainly seen as personal diaries, (rather than the traditional 'forum' structure which concentrates on solutions to problems and answers to questions). Individual blogs are quite literally a way of sharing your personal thoughts with rest of the world. For this reason, they are mostly written in the first person. In fact, most bloggers are happy to disobey the rules of English, using slang or acronyms (if that's what they think makes their point). By providing an free outlet to communicate, personal blogs have become a therapeutic means of communication for many people (who have an urge to to express their views, thoughts, desires or frustrations).

Creation of a well thought through business blog can provide interesting insight and original opinion. So blog marketing help firms in the following ways:-

1. Blogging can be a cheap way of posting content, (without having to outsource that activity to a sales copywriter). This should indirectly help organic search engine rankings.

2. A business blog raises the corporate profile of a company. Blogs that have been produced by owners of business websites tend to be more structured and reflect the values of the company, its product announcements and announcements regarding its business activities. Business blogs are a great way to speak to shareholders, employees and customers, in a less traditional format. They also provide the ability to post press releases,  encourage customer feedback on product launches, raise the brand awareness and overall corporate profile.

3. A business blog is a great way to access low cost advertising. Low cost blog software is easy for non technical users can maintain. This means a blog can be updated without the delay or cost of using a 3rd party webmaster to upload changes in web content. In particular, any self employed consultants providing specialist advice and guidance, can show off their expertise and knowledge. 

4. A business blog helps to generate new business sales. The more of a personal service a business displays through feedback on its blog, the more confidence new business clients will have in the website overall.

As posting a comment on a business blog can be an anonymous activity, a blog is completely open to abuse from 'comment spammers' or unscrupulous webmasters seeking links back to the website (to improve their own link popularity). Therefore, it is good practice for webmasters to ensure that any URL links included by visitors uses the rel=nofollow instruction. This tells engines not to necessarily trust the link destination. Humans can still click-through if they think the link is relevant to their interests.

Remember an effective blog does not just have to be made up of text alone. It can include images, video, data or music. So make sure you understand how to upload multimedia content from your computer. Similarly, many blogs are linked directly into social networks via social bookmarks or tell a friend functionality. This helps individuals to share or recommend content quickly. A good way to keep up with the latest social networks is to use a 3rd party book marking service like addthis.com

As users can comment on blogs posts, each website owner must be careful to moderate each user comment. This helps to ensure no copyright or trademark breach occurs as a result of malicious user posts. Business blogs will typically have a webmaster moderator. They need to delete any malicious postings to avoid any legal repercussions. Owners of web sites should be acutely aware that some blog postings may have potentially serious liabilities. These may include defamation, which may have serious consequences for a business. Most blogging software or scripts have a banned keyword function. This helps to stop malicious posts, ban users by email or even by IP addresses.

Most blog software or scripts can be downloaded to in minutes, and without much technical expertise. The 'fill i the gaps' templates generated from the blog scripts, usually follow a traditional layout. Each posting has a headline, main body, date posted and is usually assigned an individual URL (even if the posting is responding to a previous post and is part of a thread).

We hope this has provided a simple overview of the issues surrounding blog marketing. Happy blogging!.