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Does My Business Need a Blog?

Posted by    |   April 4th, 2012   |   No Comments

To blog or not to blog, that is the question.

Blogs have increasingly become a vital part of a comprehensive online marketing strategy.  It seems everyone is on the wagon.

Blogs can be used to share information and business updates.  By sharing information relevant to your industry, you can establish yourself as an authority in your field.  Blogs can assist in search engine optimization by regularly adding new content to your site.  They can also help in generating qualified leads – people who are taking the time to read what you have to say are likely interested in your products or services.

But the decision to start a blog should be carefully weighed.  A poorly executed blog can be far more damaging than not having one at all.

Do you have time to blog?
For most people, writing a blog is a time consuming thing.  You have to come up with topics, do research, and then formulate your thoughts into well-crafted, grammatically correct prose.  And to be a truly effective blog, you need to do this at least once a week – yikes!

Of course you have alternatives to shouldering all of this work yourself.
•    Assign the task to somebody else in your organization, or even several people, so the workload is distributed.
•    Use a ghost blogging service – but just a word of caution on this tactic: ghost blogging is a rather controversial issue in the blogosphere.  If you are going to have a ghost blogger, be transparent about it.  Use a disclaimer that states that you aren’t actually writing it, but read and approve everything posted (and be sure that you do!).
•    Ask others within your industry to do a guest blog post.

Do you have enough content?
Do you have content you can regularly post that your customers – current and prospective – will be interested in reading and sharing?  There can be many things to blog about:
•    Opinions on industry topics
•    Tutorials related to your area of expertise
•    Answers to your most frequently asked questions
•    New hires
•    Product and project launches

After analyzing the pros and cons, if you decide you need a blog, stay tuned to Insight’s blog where we will explore ways to cultivate content, tips and tricks to make your blog work for you, blogging mistakes to avoid, and many more titillating tidbits of the blogosphere.

If you decide a blog isn’t right for you, keep in mind that there are alternatives:
•    Micro-blogging (i.e. Twitter or Facebook) is helpful if you are sharing links to other content or if you just have short bits of information.
•    Create a “case studies” section on your site where you can feature specific examples of your product or service benefiting your customer.  This allows you to specifically promote your company, as opposed to a blog, which should avoid directly promoting your business.
•    Add a news section to your site if you regularly generate press releases that get featured.

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