Looking for new ways to expand your business and marketing? Seeking new avenues to reach more clients, customers, prospects and even partners for your business? Need a low cost, high impact resource for client acquisition and retention? You should consider adding the practice of blogging to your marketing strategies.
Although the beginnings of the Blog started as an online diary for individuals, blogging can deliver great results for businesses. With an online blog, your business can build its brand, reach new clients and prospects, communicate with current clients and prospects and generate new avenues of income for a very low cost. The art of blogging can take some time to master, but even the most rudimentary attempts can bring great results.
Blogging is nothing more than a series of related articles published on a website. There are political blogs, technology blogs, medical blogs, personal blogs and many more types of blogs currently online. Each is used to teach, share and inform readers about ideas, techniques, products and services and even interesting news. With such a variety of ways to communicate, finding the right voice for your business is not difficult at all.
Start by determining what you want your blog to do. Are you planning to teach others how to use your products? Maybe you could inform readers on updates and new options available with your services. Even posting testimonials from current customers and clients can be your goal. Or maybe, you can use multiple reasons.
Once you know what you want to communicate, then determine which blogging platform you plan to use. There are a number of free blog software programs as well as a few paid ones. Each has its own pros and cons, but along the lines of free blogging platforms, WordPress is one of the most popular and comes in both a free hosted service (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted software program that you host on your own website. Hosting your own provides you with many more options and more flexibility, but requires more attention with setup and configuration.
After choosing and if needed, installing, the software you plan to use, its time to begin blogging. Start with a simple topic and simply write an article about your business. It can be an announcement about a new service or a quick testimonial from a client. You will find that one article can quickly spawn another, and before long you can add a number of articles for your blog.
Continued blogging will help build a greater audience, and with that audience you can pitch ideas, new products and even generate revenue with outside advertising. The point is that you can use a blog to communicate in ways that many businesses are not doing. With so many people using the internet to find what they are needing and wanting, a blog can help attract more opportunities to connect with clients and prospects.
