10 Reasons Businesses Should Blog

Thanks to everyone who attended my brief SEO training seminar on blogging at the Manchester Growth Show this morning, I think we can all agree the whole event was a great success. Below, as promised, are the main points I made in the seminar. If you have any further questions about business blogging or internet marketing, don't hesitate to contact me at tim.roberts@i-com.net.

Why bother to Blog? WIIFM (What’s in it for me?)

Well let’s start with results. After much consultation, common sense and persuasion on my part the Clinical Negligence Department of Pannone LLP agreed to be the first department to trial our commercial blog platform in 2007. The aim: to increase relevant new content on a weekly basis. Today Pannone LLP has 7 blogs, why?

Last month the blogs delivered over 3,000 unique visitors; this led to over 50 people going on to investigate how to get in touch with Pannone!

If this is not compelling enough to take action, learn more about creating a commercial blog and take the activity seriously, here are ten more reasons and what’s in it for you:

1. It is a great way to convey your business and brand personality – It gives you the opportunity to convey your thoughts and expertise over and above your website. You can be more informal, offer opinions, interact with your visitors, and get across your personality and the personality of your brand.
2. You can demonstrate your knowledge, experience or expertise - blogging is a great way to demonstrate the fact that you know what you are talking about. Going into greater depth on a subject allows you to engage with your visitors and demonstrate your knowledge.
3. When we began working with Pannone LLP on their blog strategy, our main aim was to help bring the website alive and keep it up to date – Consistently posting new, interesting content gives visitors a reason to come back. It also satisfies the search engine robots, which like to see sites being regularly updated. When was the last time you updated your website? Having a blog gives you the opportunity to create regular and dynamic content that you and your staff can change on a regular basis.
4. Give your customers and visitors added value – by blogging regularly, you can give your customers and visitors yet another reason to come back and visit your site, especially if you are using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to send out updates about your recent posts.
5. Help with search engine optimisation and social media population – a blog is a great way to build extra visibility with the search engines. It also provides the platform to inform your followers on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc. This saves time and helps build your social network.
6. It gives visitors a reason to buy – whilst your website will give visitors lots of information about your products or services, your blog will offer a way for you to demonstrate why they are important or valuable. This could be through tips, guidance or possibly even case studies.
7. Become the expert - By blogging on a regular basis, you will build up a following in your industry, improving your brand recognition and publicity far and beyond your traditional customer base.
8. Excellent content for social media channels – with so many social media networks out there how many can you manage? Not many! Do you want to run your business or become a social media guru? You want to run your business don’t you? The challenge is to ensure you're not sucked in to all the rubbish often spoken by so called Social Media Gurus (by the way they don’t exist). With a well developed blog and the RSS feeds set up you can share your expertise, opinions and personality by regularly posting on your blog, providing a vast array of new, fresh content that you can tweet or share to your heart’s content!
9. You can show that you care – the time and effort that you dedicate to blogging will show to your website visitors that you really care about this business and are happy to go that extra mile.
10. It shows that you embrace the new age of communication – however blogging isn’t the end of the matter. If you are really going to make it work you need to take advice and develop a cohesive blogging strategy. If you do this, your blog will be better known and your traffic will really start to grow.

These ten key points are obviously, a general overview, but I hope that they demonstrate to you the huge potential of blogging as an avenue by which you can grow your business. Once again, if you have any further questions you can contact me direct at tim.roberts@i-com.net. In the meantime, happy blogging!