business blog

Sarah Worsham / Jan 12, 2009

Do You Have a Blogging Strategy?

thinkinghiimhmicheal Many businesses have blogs. Many businesses feel they should start blogs. Why? Because everyone else is doing it. This isn’t a really strong reason to do anything in business – unless you want to be just like everyone else.

If you have a business blog or are thinking of starting one, take a few minutes to ponder why you are blogging. Hopefully your reasons involve helping and connecting with your customers, which should increase revenue and savings. Using these reasons as goals to form a blogging strategy can really help direct your efforts and produce better results.

Once you have an endpoint (your goals), it will be much easier to work backwards to figure out how to achieve your goals. What will you write about? Who in your company will be blogging? What will you incorporate into the design of your blog? How will you connect with your customers? Where will you syndicate your blog content? Will you use social media to increase awareness of your blog?

Do you have a business blog? What is your blogging strategy?

(photo by hi I’m h micheal @ Flickr CC)

Sarah Worsham / Jan 5, 2009

Moving to WordPress.com – What to Consider

Over the break we moved Sazbean.com and some of our other blogs over to WordPress.com from self-hosting WordPress on our own server. Most of the process was relatively easy and overall we’re pleased with the results. We made the decision to move for a few reasons: saving time and effort from updates and support, saving hosting costs (much cheaper), and additional syndication across WordPress’ network.

If you’re thinking of moving to WordPress.com or using them as your blogging platform, here’s what you should consider:

Advantages

WordPress.com takes care of all the updates and support
Cheap – you can have a blog hosted for free, but their low cost upgrades for control over CSS and domain name are worth it
Additional syndication of your content throughout the WordPress network – we’ve already seen a jump in traffic from this effect
Good selection of widgets to add functionality to your site – no need to worry about getting them working properly
Integrated dashboard – makes it easy to work with multiple blogs and the interface is very easy to use

Disadvantages

Limited control over the design and functionality of your blog (you have full CSS control with a paid upgrade)
No javascript allowed – which limits your ability to use custom widgets and other services that require a script tag
No outside site analytics – WordPress.com provides integrated statistics, but you won’t be able to use any outside analytics services since you cannot add any script tags to your blog
Limited control over your domain name – unless you have control over your name server, you have to point your blog domain to wordpress.com so you’ll lose the ability to add any subdomains. They have allowed some ability to host your own email or use Gmail. Hosting multiple blogs from the same domain is also limited.
Limited control over files you can add to your blog (only images unless you purchase an upgrade – and then only movie files) – not too much of a problem with the various types of web services available to link to

Summary

After we moved to WordPress.com there have been some things that we could no longer do on our blog (in design and some in functionality). But, overall, the tradeoff in terms of cost and time savings as well as additional exposure has already been worth it. We’ll update you on our thoughts again after we’ve been here for awhile.

We want to hear from you – Do you use WordPress.com? What are your thoughts? If you have a self-hosted blog, why did you make that decision?

Sarah Worsham / Nov 5, 2008

11 Tips for Getting Readers for Your Business Blog

readerpedrosimoes7 You’ve set up a blog for your business and started writing. Now, how do you get readers?

Content, Content and more Content – Did I mention content? The only way to attract and keep readers is with great content.
Share – You started a business because you have some specialized expertise. Share that expertise with your readers. They will respect your efforts and look to you for advise.
Consistency – Readers need to know that there’s a reason to check back from time to time. Choose a posting schedule and try to stick with it. Ideally, you should be posting at least once a week.
Stay on Target – While straying off the path occasionally is ok, readers generally expect you to post on a certain subject matter (whatever your expertise is). You may want to keep a personal blog for other posts (remember you’re representing your business).
Listen & Respond – Encourage readers to interact with you through comments and email. Listen to what they say and respond intelligently. Your blog should be a place to have a conversation with your customers.
Be Helpful – Related to #5, anywhere you see a question you can answer, answer it. Help people out with problems and concerns, not just on your blog, but anywhere you see people post their issues. If it’s something you can write about on your blog, you’ll also help out others who may have the same problem.
Market – Add links to your blog on your website, your business card, your brochures, your email signature, and anywhere else you can. You’ll need to let customers know that you have a blog.
Be Social – Join social networks and socialize with the members. Most social networks will also allow you to link to your website and blog. Some will even automatically import posts from your RSS feed.
Blogosphere – Read other industry blogs and comment on their posts. Link to posts you think your readers would be interested on. Write opinions about posts on your own blog.
Keywords & SEO – Don’t go overboard trying to get keywords into your posts, but do take good SEO practices into account. Knowing the keywords you want to target can help you incorporate them into your posts.
Patience – It takes time to grow a readership on a blog. It can take over a year to get a decent following, so don’t expect your blog to take off right away. It takes a regular commitment to great content and a lot of patience.

Do you have a business blog? What tips can you share for getting readers?

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(photo by pedrosimoes7 @ Flickr CC)

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