A Business Blog is a new approach to blending web design/blogging/SEO/SEM and Social Media marketing to create a powerful marketing tool.

Blog & Web site Working Together

We create an online presence for your business that combines the immediacy and inbound marketing potential of a blog with a standard web site. To get the best bang for your online marketing efforts both should be considered and it is best if your blog is published at least once a week. The more frequently you blog, the more the Search Engines will crawl your site.

So how do they work together?

Blogging - Your blog sits at the “front” of your website. This is your new “HOME” page. Instead of having a static page which can stay the same for weeks, months or years, you will have a page with fresh content on a regular basis. All the fresh keyword rich content you create gets published and picked up by search engines here. This gives you a platform which you can add keyword rich content to that you then promote around the web. Blogging gives you more pages on a site that can be indexed by Search Engines and allows you to rank for less popularly searched keywords but that can still drive a lot of traffic overall (what is commonly known as the “long-tail”).

Website - A “traditional website” where there are multiple tabs for the standard pages - About Us, Contact, Products, Services, Our Team, Portfolio, etc. New targeted traffic is being uncovered all the time by the blog. Sales are a numbers game, so the more traffic the more conversions to leads or sales.

Blog about one of your products or services, the search engines will pick up the post, as it is fresh content you may end up near the top of the search engine result page for the content.

A business blog combined with a traditional marketing website is a powerful marketing tool which can increase your sales and in these tough days that’s a great deal.

With the growing presence of social media as a marketing tool in its own right, we are going to see an increase in the role of business blogging.

Business Blogs will play a central role

It is true that there are major changes afoot - Google’s recent Caffeine update puts more emphasis on fresh real time content. A business blog will play a central role for companies wanting to engage with customers and prospects using social media.

If we take some of the more popular social media tools as examples:

• Twitter is great but a little restrictive - it’s a challenge for some of the more verbose to say everything in 140 characters, so Twitter is often used to make people aware of other sources of information or to initiate connections;
• Social networks can be found in many different forms from Facebook to the creation of niche social networks on platforms like Ning - they come and go (some quicker than others obviously) but with each new outlet you need to establish a whole new infrastructure and set of contacts;
• Podcasts and video have their sites like YouTube or iTunes but in most cases, it’s difficult for businesses to achieve an independent identity with them alone.

A blog, however, allows a business to bring all of these elements together, creating a central point of contact for customers and prospects, providing the business with its own social network hub. This allows businesses to expand on the information they have disseminated on Twitter, YouTube or iTunes.

How can a business blog bring all these elements together?  Let’s say I meet a new friend at Starbucks. They will get a certain impression of me from what I am wearing, what I look like, where we are meeting, what I’m drinking, who I am talking to and about what etc. All of these things give a certain picture of me as a person but it is still a superficial one.

However, if I invite them to my home then they have a much more complete view of me. They’ll see where I live, the type of house, how my home is furnished, my pets, etc etc. In other words, you get a much more complete sense of me when you visit my home because it is much more multifaceted.

As this relates to a business blog; social networking sites, discussion forums, Twitter etc are all versions of Starbucks where you can a first image of me. A business blog, however, offers much more of an insight and is essentially the online equivalent of my home.

You need a place to invite people to online

This is not putting down the importance of social media tools. All these other outlets are great when used in line with a business’ commercial aims, but you need to have somewhere to “invite” friends back to online rather than always meet at Starbucks. That’s where a business blog becomes very important, bringing all these elements together as well as contributing in its own right.

As you look at the world of social media and the innumerable opportunities that it brings with it, a business blog should sit solidly at the core of this activity.  To find out more about business blogs and how they can help you, contact us today for a no-obligation meeting to discuss your needs.