When you research most of the options available for promoting your business, it’s clear that the world wide web offers many attractive benefits and possibilities for businesses to not only create greater exposure for their products and services, but also to leverage the business owner’s time and effort.
The problem is that many business owners just don’t know how to utilize this medium to its full advantage. Many settle for putting up a website that is often no more useful than a static online brochure and then just hoping that it will work for them.
There is a smarter, cheaper, better, easier and faster solution. It’s called a business blog.
Some of the immediate advantages a blog offers businesses over traditional, static web sites, are a smarter content publishing and management platform, more direct involvement with their customers, built-in capabilities like RSS feeds and search engine notification, and greater control and flexibility over the way content is managed.
Plus, it is much easier to promote and grow your business online using a blog, than it is using a website if you know how. Not to mention the fact that your promotional efforts can have a longer lifetime and give you greater exposure than traditional advertising media like newspaper or radio ads. (In fact, you can combine these, for example, making your current promotion be the home page of your blog, then sending radio or print ad visitors to your blog.)
What’s the difference between a business blog and a business website?
You can make a business blog look and feel exactly like a website – in fact, many of the sites you are visiting right now are probably powered by blogging platforms like WordPress, instead of popular web design HTML applications like Frontpage or Dreamweaver. A significant difference, is that you don’t need to know web site coding language like HTML to run a business blog, or add and modify content on your site. You simply add content and publish. This makes business blogs a perfect online marketing tool for business owners.
Another important difference is that blogs allow you to have “conversations” and build interactive relationships with other people, where regular web sites tend to be more of a “one-way” vehicle for presenting information to visitors.
What if you already have a web site?
If you currently have a website that requires you to contact your web developer, web designer, web master or an IT savvy friend, nephew, niece or neighbor every time you want to make a change to your site, then you definitely need to consider adding a blog to your site. Simply install the blog in a subdirectory of your domain (e.g. yourdomain.com/blog), then promote your business using the blog and link your posts back to your site for more information about your products or services, to purchase, etc …
If you don’t have a website yet, then save yourself money on costly web development and a lot of hassle and just use a blog. With a blog, you can easily promote your business by adding regular posts and articles about a variety of different topics.
Here are just some ideas for topics you can write about your business, then post on your business blog:
- Product recalls
- Customer service information (e.g. how to ship product back, refund policies, etc.)
- News about your own business
- Product training information
- News about your suppliers
- Product / Service tips (how to spot quality, how to avoid paying too much or being ripped off, etc ..)
- Links to useful resources and information
- New things coming soon to your business
- FAQs
- Profiling customers
- Product service reviews and comparisons
- Product / Service benefits
As you can see, there’s no shortage of information to write about when it comes to promoting your business.
Now … just getting a blog up and running is not really going to help you. You need to know how to configure it properly if you want to achieve the best results with the least effort.
Fortunately, there is a great resource I recommend you check out if you are interested in knowing more about the benefits and advantages of using a business blog to help you promote your business and sell your products and services smarter. A company called SelfPublishWeb.com offers two ways to help you set up a blog for your business that will not only get your site pages quickly indexed in Google and other major search engines (usually in as little as 2-3 days), but they show you how to fully configure it so that it becomes a powerful marketing tool for your business, with many automated built-in promotional features that you don’t even need to think about.
You simply write about your business and the automated system running silently in the background goes to work for you.
SelfPublishWeb.com offers two options: They can fully install, set up and configure your business site / business blog for you and you’re then ready to go in as little as 4-5 working days, or, if you want to save several hundred dollars, you can purchase their complete ’step-by-step’ DIY video training tutorials package, which is done in a completely non-technical way so that anyone with basic computer skills (like the ability to cut and paste) can just watch over their shoulder and follow along as they show you how to get your own business blog up and running in 2 days or less.
