The Undersigned.net had an article on why business blogs are important. Most businesses believe that blogs aren’t for business. It becomes to personal and many try to hide behind the corporate face. The article lists 10 reasons on why it is important to business blogs. I agree with a lot of them and do think its good for businesses to blog. I’ll review his reasons and give my opinion on each.
You know your field of business best. Business strive on being the best. If you are the best then it’s not a problem to give insight to a particular topic. Now this doesn’t mean give away all the trade secrets of your business, but your blog can prove that you do know what you are talking about in the field.
Reach more people. Blogs make it easier to gain readers especially with widely accepted companies making it easy to publish news through RSS feeds. It captures existing readers interests and makes it easy for new readers to join.
Let your employees compete. Nothing beats user generated content. It keeps a site up-to-date and if it makes it part of a job there is a better chance that the site will stay updated. Creativity is one of the biggest things in business in my opinion. It is what turns good products into great products. It means the product different than any other product out there.
Learn while doing. Collaboration is another key to business. Working together sometimes gets lost in non-creative environments. Sometimes it’s even discouraged in business. Some businesses believe in the concept while others do not.
Coverage. Blogs are a great form of communication. Like news most blogs tend to stay current and up to date with what is going on on a particular subject.
Will the idea work? Before investing a lot of money in a particular direction put a particular concept out there to see what kind of feedback you receive. Putting a concept out is different than putting entire plans of a product in the blog.
Customer relationship. This is a huge point. There is an interaction between business, the people in the business, and the real people of business that make things happen which are the customers.
Get the best employees. Now some people blog about the most random things which is fine for a personal blog. When you are writing a business blog the majority of the articles should be about the topic of business and the writers should know what they are talking about.
Host your blog on your main website. If it’s hard to people to even find the blog its really not worth all the trouble. Like I said earlier since blogs act like news it keeps the site up to date. Specialized content writers aren’t always necessary.
Google loves bloggers. This is a huge point and a reason why most of my sites that I work on now are blog oriented to user generated. Fresh content for search engines is huge for placement. It really makes a difference if you have a blog and your competitor does not.
Well his reasons are very much valid. I know people will have many cons as well to writing business blogs, but as I said in the last paragraph is your competitor has a blog and you do not then you will be fighting a much larger uphill battle.
