Business Blogs – Should You Have One?

A business blog has a number of benefits. Through communicating and interacting with customers it can build loyalty as well as attract new customers because it’s an excellent way to illustrate your expertise in a certain industry, thereby establishing your credibility.

However, quotes such as creating a business blog will ‘turbo-boost your sales’ or ‘bring in huge amounts of additional income’ are extremely misleading. Building an insightful, interesting and ultimately a business enhancing blog is a long time-consuming process. Rarely updated business blogs can do more harm than good, as can blogs with incorrect or poorly researched posts.

The amount of time required to research and write each blog post should not be underestimated, and is the downfall of many new bloggers. If possible, dedicate the job to a member of staff with excellent writing skills; otherwise decide if you have a number of hours each week that you set aside to update your blog.

There is no doubt that when done properly blogs are excellent marketing tools. They foster relationships, enhance loyalty, and can become ranked highly in search engines, but think long term - instant results will not be forthcoming.

The fundamentals of social networking differ to other forms of online marketing. Social networking isn’t about spending money to create visibility for your business. It's about participation, being part of a community and contributing to it – in essence the fundamentals of social networking are:

1. Creating Awareness – especially in the early days you must be an extremely active user
2. Developing Relationships – make contact and develop relationships with influential users
3. Creating Something of Value – only content which is fun, interesting or useful will gain visibility
4. Building your Reputation – be active, contribute to the community and avoid overly promoting your content

There are a number of different types of social networks – social networking websites (Facebook, MySpace), social news websites (Digg, Mixx), social bookmarking websites (Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us), and niche sites such as Twitter.

Each type of social network requires a slightly different marketing approach, although they all require the four fundamentals – creating awareness, developing relationships, creating something of value, and building your reputation.

The one aspect of social networking which is important to consider is that it does require effort and a huge amount of time. To create awareness and build up a good level of trust on social media websites means that you must actively seek high quality content which can be submitted, as well as reading and tagging those articles which are of high quality.