Keeping in mind that all offline companies need an online presence these days anyway, blogging might be the stroke of marketing brilliance that puts any company over the edge from mediocrity or obscurity into big money profits.
What's so great about blogging? Just about everything.
Its first advantage is that it's extremely inexpensive -- almost free. All you need to pay for is your Internet providing platform, which needless to say you're paying for already. Then, you have to put some time into it. This doesn't need to be a lot of time per day, but it needs to be quite consistent and add up to significant time over the course of time (get it?). Now, in business, "time is money", so this is your greatest cost with a blog. But, if you use it right, it's an investment in your business just like taking the time to stock the stuff in an organized way in the warehouse is. Blogging can also be done by every literate, halfway interesting person in your company. What if every one of you blogged on a certain thing for 30 to 60 minutes a day? You would build up a major blog in no time.
So, why do you want this blog? Well, blogging is the best way to get on and rise in the search engines. Webcrawlers look for two things: lots of up to date text and lots of links. Since you need an online presence one way or another, and since you want it to be high profile, this is a way to get web surfers finding you all the time. To do this, be sure you and/or your employees are constantly writing at your blog, and that you always link out through the text on your blogs, the way online journalists do. This allows you greater transparency, which people appreciate because it makes you more trustworthy; it allows you to link out to other blog posts of yours or to other company related websites; and, it elevates you in the search engines.
But why are people even reading at your blog? As you write more and more you take on an air of authority that people are attracted to. They come to you for valuable insights or information. It's also a way for you to tell all about what your company does without selling, marketing, or intimidating or irritating people. They begin selling themselves on your company or business.
A company blog also permits rapid, personable exchange of ideas and information within your company if you have a fairly good sized one. And if you have a virtual office or your company is large, this makes it easy for people in separate offices or separate nations to post questions and get answers quickly, without running up any telephone costs and allowing other employees who might have had similar questions to benefit from the answers with less time and effort.
And--a blog facilitates the customer feedback process. You can more easily find out what's wrong with your product, how it could be better, how people would respond if you tweaked this or added that. Again, no phone bill, no customer service confrontations, no snappy answers that you regret later.
It can therefore be seen why blogging could in fact turn out to be your best business tool! The Author benefits from being able to work from Home and Make money online. Her favourite resource site can be found at http://www.workingforwealth.net |
0 comments:
Post a Comment