Business Blogs Can Deliver Marketing Punch
A business blog is not an online diary. It's an inexpensive marketing channel that too many small businesses ignore at their peril.
The reasons are understandable. Resouces are already stretched so thin as to be transparent. When every sale is a minor triumph, investing time in a blog is more than a luxury, it's an obscenly gratuitious use of precious moments.
Or is it? If small businesses understood blogs better, they'd see the value.
A blog is not a diary. It's a series of short, focused articles. Each entry has a common theme but they can stand alone. People write blogs for different reasons and in business that reason is marketing.
The purpose of a blog entry is to catch the reader's eye. Before that you need to grab the attention of the search engines - effective blogs have great SEO. Once you've snared the reader you need to keep their attention with prose that's engaging and informative. You've already started selling to them, so now you feed them through to your main website. Some will convert into a sale.
Amazon.com runs a blog. Not surprisingly it's full of book reviews. But you won't find a link to it from their main website (at least, I couldn't). No one goes to Amazon to check on the blog. But they search for a book review online, find the Amazon review, decide to buy and head for the checkout. That's one more sale for Amazon.
Building a blog for a business takes time. It's not going to become an overnight marketing success. But the sooner you start, the sooner it'll start attracting attention and bringing customers your way.
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