photo credit: Markus Rödder
5 reasons you should consider starting a blog for your business or professional services.
Quick and sweet. Here are five good reasons to start a blog if you own a business or provide services.
1. Search engines are configured to favor blogs over your typical basic, static website. Why? 24 hours a day search engine robots crawl through the internet looking for new pieces of information to add to their mega-indexes. The more new content you have, the more they will visit your site. (Blogs are like newspapers in that you are always adding new content, thoughts, etc. in the form of posts).
2. It’s more cost effective than advertising and other forms of paid promotion. If money is tight, a blog could be a cost effective, quick way to maintain your brand image and stay in the public eye.
3. Blogs let you reach out to your customers. The lifeblood of a business is knowing the needs of your clientele. Let them tell you exactly what they like, want and need by posting comments on your blog! This also helps you build relationships with clients and greatly helps the next reason you should start a blog, mentioned in number 4 below.
4. A blog is not only the best way to build traffic to your website, it enables you to become an expert in your field in a very short time.Of course, this only works if your content is good. Go for quality over quantity. Take the time to make good, long posts and search engines and visitors will come.
5. You can use your blog to build a líst of members. People come to your blog because they feel it has useful information or resources that will help your them address a particular problem or achieve their aim. It is the perfect trust-building moment to collect an email adress so you can continue to stay in contact. Make sure you have a RSS signup at the very least. Invite visitors to sign up for access to your newsletters. You should also have a membership signup form such as with MailChim or Aweber.
So there you have five good reasons for every business owner to start and maintain a blog. There is lots of money to be made on the internet, but you have to work on doing it the right way. The right way means building your online repulation and establishing yoruself as an expert by keeping your site content regularly updated and fresh with meaningful, useful content, and reaching out to your client base through newsletters, respondng to comments, and sharing your recommendations and advice.
As Raymond Carr recently said, “Internet marketing is a brilliant business to be in. There are boundless opportunities to run online businesses which can make incredible amounts of money, if you have established that there is a market for your chosen niche or product, and have done the necessary research.”
Originally posted 2011-01-17 15:11:22.
In 2009 for Facebook there had been a 276% expansion in the age grouping 35-54.