Business Blogging
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by Barry Welford
BPWrapBusiness Blogging
- Type P or Type B?
Having a business blog can be one of the most powerful marketing weapons in your armory. In some ways, a business blog can give you more visibility with potential customers than your website. It also can give a rapid way of dialoguing with your customers. Here you will find some explanation of blogging in general. We then go into greater detail about the specifics of business blogging.
If you need help in setting up a business blog, then SMM can do that for you. If you need help in writing blog posts that will connect with your prospects and clients and that are highly visible to the search engines, then SMM can help there too. You will find more details on this at the foot of this page.
Most people by now have heard the word 'blogging' although it may cause a number of different reactions. This is because there really are two different types of blogs. Here are typical reactions people may have as reflected in the questions they ask about these two types of blogs:
Why discuss personal online journals in a website on effective Internet Marketing?
Aren't blogs mostly written by teenagers on MySpace?
Will my thoughts and views really do anything for my business?
I hear business blogging can be a useful tool in Internet marketing. Is that true?
Do business blogs help to create search engine visibility for the business website?
Do the newsfeeds for business blogs help in marketing efforts?
They look like questions about very different types of documents, and indeed they are. There really are two very different types of blogs.
is for Personal. It is linked to the past, the history of blogging. Many blogs are personal online journals. Indeed some of them are private and only shown to close friends or to other members of the same company. Some CEOs of even large companies have written blogs like that. Such blogs include news about their companies and sometimes their views on personal or business issues that come onto their radar screens. If you're interested in that type of blog, it's fairly straightforward and there's not much more you need to know.
is for Business. It is linked to the future. We're talking specifically about business blogging here. Business blogging is about communicating with your market place, your customers and your prospects. It's slightly confusing to use the same word, blog, for this Type B activity as was used for the Type P activity. However the same software is used to produce both types of blogs. As it happens, that software and the blog structures it produces are extremely visible on the Internet. It's all overkill for a Type P blog, but is really powerful and effective when applied to Type B blogs
Another way of looking at Type P and Type B blogs is on
the product-driven << -- -- -- -- >> customer-centric scale.
Type P blogs tend to be product-driven. It's all about Me. The P stands for Personal, remember. A good Type B blog on the other hand should be customer-centric. It should be developed keeping in mind the information needs of customers and prospects. Since a Type B blog can be the most powerful way of communicating with customers, it is worth spending some time and effort to make it as effective as it can be.
A short explanation of blogging and blogging software will explain why Blogs are so powerful. A blog is a type of website. The blogging software includes a Content Management System (CMS), which makes it very easy to add new posts or edit old posts. Detailed explanations of business blogging can be found in two newsletters, Business Blogging Now (February 2005) and Your Website Needs a Blog (August 2006). The second can be read independently of the first.
Business blogs are very effective in growing sales for three reasons:
- A business blog is the ideal format for informing and maintaining a dialogue with customers and prospects.
- The news feed for a business blog provides instant alerts to industry movers and shakers.
- The blog architecture is extremely search-engine friendly, particularly using categories.
Blogging software is very user-friendly. Blogger is free software provided by Google. The blog can also be hosted by Google, in which case it will have a URL like bobsblog.blogsport.com. In other words, the blogs are all subdomains of blogspot.com. You can also host them elsewhere by FTPing them to your own domain. This is usually preferable since it suggests greater authority for the blog. One of the SMM blogs, The Other Bloke's Blog, was initially produced this way when it started in February 2005. It deals with Internet Marketing and Business from a Canadian perspective. It was recently transferred to WordPress software, which offers many optimization possibilities. The transition was made with full precautions to ensure Google keyword rankings were maintained at all times.
WordPress is a very popular Open Source blogging software. BPWrap, which deals with Internet Marketing, is now produced with WordPress. It has been running since March 2004 and was converted to WordPress in May 2006. A new blog on the Mobile Internet world, StayGoLinks, is also produced with WordPress and started in July 2006. All three SMM blogs attract a great deal more visitors to them than visit the SMM website, even though the latter has been running several times longer. The explanations for this can be found in the newsletter mentioned above, Your Website Needs A Blog.
SMM can help you either to set up a blog or can write more powerful blog posts for your existing blog. This can be done on a post-by-post basis or for a specific period of time. Whatever help you may need to make your business blog more effective, contact SMM today for advice or for assistance without obligation.
Added to site 1 September 2006
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