If you have an aspiring writer on staff you may want to consider promoting them to a blog writing position with your company. Both small and large companies spend money on advertising, varying from yellow pages directories and classifieds to full featured television commercials or radio advertisements. The cost of a blog is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the cost of television advertising and it can reach thousands of on-line users spreading your message and branding your company.
Your advertising managers may even have looked at blogging as an advertising medium before. The most common reason given for dismissing this approach is the large commitment of time required and the writing skills needed to come up with daily posts related to the company. It’s certainly true that with a low staff ratio, their time is better spent creating a quality product and running a store than writing a blog. Some companies, small or large, are especially suited to use a business blogging project to advertise their company and this business blogging tip is about taking a slightly different approach to a business blogging project.
When a business is providing a service that requires some expertise or gives professional advise, a business blog is a valuable publishing platform to display samples of what your company or service offers. Business tip articles are often highly sought after. Where there is a high turnover of new products or company events, a blog can use the unique features of RSS to quickly inform your clientèle of new items. Combined with an auto responder a blog is a powerful advertising method to encourage repeat visits to your company store or site.
Sharing industry related news on a blog is an easy method of communicating with a large staff and customer base. Blogs can have both public and private areas so you can use the same vehicle but require a login for the more sensitive information you might wish to share only with staff.
Don’t let your business blogging project concentrate only on selling or advertising. People are looking for information and entertainment, not to be sold to. They may not even be looking for your company so niching exclusively within your business topic may not be the best idea for your advertising campaign.
Business Blogging Tip Case Study
John Nardini does the marketing for Denali Flavors, an ice cream manufacturer. He found that his most successful high traffic blogging project was a blog on personal finance called Free Money Finance. After a little experimentation with other business blog projects, he chose personal finance because it gets a high volume of searches and because there is so much valuable information to add to the blog on a regular basis.
Denali, being the sole advertiser and sponsor of this blog gained great exposure for its logo on a totally unrelated high traffic site. For brand recognition this was an excellent marketing strategy. Ice cream is an impulsive buy and unlikely to be searched for on-line in high volume.
So think creatively about how to use a blog to advertise your business. Give it to the project managers and experiment a little with different ways to give something to your clients in order to gain them as visitors or subscribers. Once people are visiting you can display your messages, your logo and give a free sample. Do something that will stay in people’s memories so that next time they need a service or product that you can provide, they remember your name and go searching for you.
Make sure your company name comes up on the first page of as many different search engines as possible. Owning the domain name of your company name, showing your company name in the url of blogs and in bookmarked article titles are the best way to make this happen.Submission of your site to the directories is also helpful.
Our business blogging tip is to gain extra traffic to your company name blog by building a blog on one of the online hot topics and displaying your logo or advertising on all its pages by retaining sole sponsorship for this high traffic site. Niche your company business site but go where the crowds are for clients by creating a niche site on a hot topic.