Many individuals and small businesses who blog use a blog hosting website such as, Blogger, Wordpress, and Weebly. These websites provide individuals a blogging tool that doesn't require additional knowledge of web design or code. These websites are very user friendly and easy for anyone to start using. On the other hand large businesses may choose to use these blog hosting websites too, there are distinct advantages to hosting a blog on their own website:
- More content on your website allows for increased search engine traffic.
- More content betters your chances of showing up in search engine results for long-tail search queries.
- Useful and interesting content helps generate more inbound links to your blog posts and ultimately more visits to your website.
While these three things can be achieved even if a business uses a blog hosting website, it creates the added benefit of readers actually being on your website and being able to then look around at your other content and gain more knowledge about your brand and products.
Whether a business chooses to use a blog hosting website or their own website, having a blog helps to humanize their brand and is an informal way to interact with customers. Benefits of business blogging include:
- Generating recurring traffic to your website
- Telling your company story
- Teaching your audience about your products and industry
- Celebrating company and industry milestones
When it comes to blogging, it is important to know who your audience is and to have a goal in mind for what you are trying to achieve with your blog. Important questions to answer include: Who are you speaking to? Are you speaking to customers, potential customers, industry experts, or people unfamiliar with your product/service? What are your goals? Are you trying to increase sales, gain new customers, increase brand awareness, or educate people? Are you writing for B2B or B2C? These are all key questions that need to be addressed in a businesses marketing plan in order to maintain and generate quality content on their blog.
A blog written for industry experts with the intent of engaging them and providing interesting and new noteworthy topics will be written very differently than a blog written for potential customers with the intent of educating them about your company and products. These is also the possibility that a company is using a blog as an internal communication method as a way of engaging employees and providing them with key updates and happenings at the company. My workplace as really started to beef up their internal blog in the last 2 years and it is a great way to know what is going on. They post about awards we've received, key initiatives being pursued, employee spotlights from around the company, and industry news.
Overall, through my research about blogs and use of Blogger, I've found that starting a blog is pretty easy. Blog hosting websites are in the business of making it easy for anyone, regardless of experience, to have a blog. I found the more difficult part of writing a blog is developing content. As a person who is usually a perfectionist, I found writing this to be somewhat overwhelming, but I just kept reminding myself that it is INFORMAL and should represent who I AM. So to whoever is reading this blog, I am going to write as me and I not going to try and pretend I'm someone I'm not.
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