Pixel Thread

Sometimes I feel a bit like a broken record, I’m always telling people I meet who have their own businesses and websites that they should be blogging. When you work online all week, you forget that other people are quite rightly far more focussed on their core business rather than how they could be using the internet to promote themselves.

If you have a business, here are ten reasons why I think you should be blogging:

1. At its most basic, a blog can work as a simple content management system for your site, enabling you to update it without running up fees from your web agency
2. A well-written blog will promote your knowledge and / or the quality of your product
3. Blogs can provide instant communication with your customers via RSS, great for notifying people of events or new products, (but don’t ever let your blog become a sales pitch)
4. Posting on a blog is less intrusive than sending a marketing email to your customer list. People will read it if they want to rather than your message being forced into their inbox
5. Blogs create a regular ongoing dialogue with your customers, reminding them of your existence even if they have no intention of buying your product or hiring your services at that moment
6. You can benefit from feedback from your customers via comments on your posts. Even if it’s negative feedback this is useful, as it tells you where you could be doing things better
7. With its commenting system, a blog is more like a one-to-one communication tool rather than mass communication system. A blog can build a more intimate relationship with your readers than a newsletter or marketing email
8. Having a blog on your site will improve your ranking in the search engine results pages. Search engines give more value to a site that has been recently updated. By including a regularly updated blog your site will be continually refreshed
9. Your site will become visible to blog search engines like technorati.com and blogsearch.google.com attracting new people to your site
10. Writing and posting blog entries is easy, it requires no technical expertise and is as simple as filling in an online form

If you want to read more, have a look at: Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers It’s more about big businesses using blogging, but it’s all very relevant.

An older book that also tackles similar themes is The Clue Train Manifesto. It was published in 2000, but a lot of the ideas it explores are still relevant now. As one review on Amazon says: “This is about as far away from a traditional business book as you can get”.

Next time I’ll post links to some of the companies that I think are doing this well.