How To Grow Your Business With A Blog

November 12, 2010 by Douglas Idugboe
 
Now that Facebook and Twitter have firmly taken over the reins of social media, does it signal the end of lesser glamorous social networking technologies like blogging? I don't think so. I've been blogging for a while now and I believe no other social network be it Facebook or Twitter can substitute for a business blog.
While social networks are about people interaction, a blog is a more comprehensive medium to provide detailed information about your business, services and products. The blogging movement may no longer match the aura of Facebook, but if utilized effectively, it can be a valuable asset for your business.
What is a Business Blog?
Not all businesses have a blog. In fact, the awareness about blogs is rather low especially in the small business world. To put it in simple words, a business blog can be described as an online means to communicate with employees and customers in order to share information, knowledge and expertise.
 
How a Blog Can Help Grow Your Business?
Being a blogoholic myself, I know the true advantages of having a business blog as well as anyone else. A blog helps grow your business in more than one ways and not limited to
 
•Increased Web Traffic – An informational business blog coupled with an effective SEO strategy can help your business appear amongst the top search results on leading search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

•Channel for Information – A business blog provides a great platform to provide detailed information about your business, products and services. Facebook and Twitter are essentially people-oriented social networks while a blog is an information oriented social media tool.

•Customer Interaction – A business blog provides a fantastic opportunity to inform, interact and learn from your customers. It's a great way of soliciting feedback from customers and learning from their experiences. Contrary to popular belief, I strongly believe that blogging is a 2-way channel – you provide the info and users ask the questions as well as the other way around – you pose questions to users and they come back with the feedback.

•Feedback – A blog provides a business with opportunities to launch surveys and polls for products/ services. It allows users and customers to leave feedback using comments.

•Customer Loyalty – A business blog can hold prospects' interest for longer, winning customers over a period of time, and bringing them back to hear from you every once in a while. No spam emails, no irritating voicemail messages – yet mighty effective.

•Community Building – A business blog works wonder to build an online community. While it's no match for Facebook groups or Fan Pages, regular readers of your blog develop a strong bond with your business. A blog therefore helps forge a sense of community that can be strengthened both online and off.
How a Blog Won't Help Grow Your Business?
It is equally important to understand and clear the following misconceptions about business blogs.
 
•A blog is a low-cost alternative for a business website – It's not! A business gains maximum benefits by linking its blog and website, any attempts to replace one with the other is a sure shot recipe for disaster.

•A blog should be my business' only social media presence – Many businesses are content with having a website and a blog. They never think about expanding their social media presence believing their current social media efforts are enough. Active presence on leading social networks like Facebook and Twitter not only helps you reach to new audiences; it also helps bring additional traffic to your business blog and website.

•Creating and maintaining a business blog is a costly proposition – This is just not true! There are several free/ low-cost blogging platforms to choose from. Maintaining a blog isn't costly either – you need to commit a resource to do it regularly. The dedicated resource/ time shouldn't be looked at as an overhead but rather as a strategic investment which recovers itself quickly in due course of time.
 
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