Why Start a Blog for Your Business?

"True competitors know it's exhilarating to be involved in something that's very challenging. They don't fear it. They seek it. Is it fun to do that which is ordinary, easy, simple, something anyone can do? Not at all."

~ John Wooden, Former UCLA Basketball Coach,

Winner of 10 NCAA Championships

Blogging has been quite the rage for the past several years. First begun as an online means of recording a diary, blogs have become about sharing all sorts of information. You can find blogs on every subject, sub-subject and in every medium found online. With so many blogs out there, why would you start a blog for your business?

1. Demonstrate your knowledge: A blog is a quick and easy way to share information that shows your knowledge in your field. You can have multiple authors to share the knowledge throughout your organization. There are many ways to demonstrate knowledge:

• Commenting on trends
• Eliciting customer input
• Announcing your latest launch
• Explaining a new idea
• Giving instructions
• Reference industry blogs/websites with useful information

2. Share your personality: Blogging doesn’t have to be formal writing, so you can interject a bit of humor and personality into your posts. It’s an opportunity to help clients get to know the people in your company. This can often help to further relationship-building, which is key to building a larger customer base.

3. Educate your clients: Do you find yourself answering the same questions over and over to your clients? Do you wish you had a collection of these answers? This is one of the reasons the Landau Design blog was created. As we work with many companies that are just delving into the web space, we created a blog to explain web terminology and opportunities. We can demonstrate knowledge and help clients who feel lost in the world of the web.

4. Receive feedback from your clients: Blogs have a built-in mechanism for commenting, so it creates the perfect opportunity for getting input from clients. You can include polls and questions to elicit feedback, as well as reading comments on informational posts. It’s the optimum situation for getting input and suggestions that you might otherwise never hear.

5. Improve your search engine ranking: Blogging by nature lends itself to increased search engine indexing. While the indexing will be for your blog and not your website, you will tie the two together so it benefits your website. Why is this so?

• You have more content to index, which means more opportunities for indexing
• You have an easy way to give and get links (optimum way to increase page rank)
• You have a built-in keyword index that the search engines pick up on
• If you blog with Blogger, they are owned by Google and rumored to index their blogs daily

More information:

• Should You Start a Business Blog?
• 12 Reasons Why You Should Start a Blog
• 23 Questions for Prospective Bloggers - Is a Blog Right for You?
• How Do I Start a Blog?