How Blogs Work for Everyday Business

Written on the 17 November 2020

To blog or not to blog...well, it's not really a question anymore. The truth is the research is proving that blogs are helping businesses in many, many ways. From driving traffic to your website, to helping you get new clients, blogs are now a very effective way of promoting yourself to the customers you want to reach.

In this article we'll discuss the key ways in which a blog can help to boost your business and its online presence, as well as easy techniques that you can use. We'll tell you what the technique is, why you want to use this technique and how a blog can help you achieve it.

1. Search Engine Optimisation

What:Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the techniques you use to improve your ranking in Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Why: The better your website SEO, the higher you will appear in search engine results. The higher you appear in search engine results, the more traffic you get to your website. The more traffic you get to your website, the more leads you make. The more leads you make...the bigger your smile with all the extra revenue! In comparison, if other businesses are appearing higher than you, they are getting the business instead.

How: Blogs that are integrated into your website help with SEO in two ways. One, because search engines will rank you higher if the content on your website is regularly changing, and two, by giving you the opportunity to use your keywords (words that your target market are searching with) in your website content. The technique you should use is to identify a keyword/s of yours, like " tax returns" if you are an accountant. Then, write a blog focusing on tax returns. Where ever you use the phrase "tax returns" in your blog content, link the text back to the page on your website where you talk about your tax return service.

2. Increase Your Traffic

What: Your website traffic is the number of people who visit your website on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Why: As suggested above, the more traffic you get, the more potential for revenue your website will generate for your business.

How: Again, a blog will increase your traffic in two ways. As mentioned above, it helps improve your SEO increasing your visibility in the search engines, but it also helps by generating interest in your website. The trick to using a Blog to increase your website traffic is to update it with fresh content on a regular basis. When your followers start to catch on to the fact that you are updating your blog every few days, they will start to follow you more closely, particularly if you are offering them information that is of value to them. The trick is to keep your blogs short, light and interesting. Don't feel that you need to write an entire 500 page essay every two days. The most effective blog posts are often only three or four paragraphs long, are written in light, easy-to-understand language and contain great information.

A Marketing Sherpa research paper, showed that websites that have blogs -

3. Use the power of viral marketing to leverage your time

What: Viral Marketing is where your fans and followers forward your online marketing activities to their friends and followers because they think your marketing has value. It's a form of word-of-mouth advertising for the online world and social media is the most common way of doing this.

Why: With hundreds of people forwarding your marketing material around the Internet, they're doing much of the hard work for you, saving you massive amounts of time. Those following your social media accounts are doing so because they like what you do, and they want more information about you. If you post something they find interesting in your social media account, they are likely to forward this onto their friends as well as revisit your website to find more interesting content.

How: The Bloomtools Blog Manager gives you the ability, that if someone comments on your website, with a facebook account it appears within their Facebook account as well (Facebook commenting). A reader of a blog, can also share it within the most popular social mediums. You can also feed updates to your own Twitter and Facebook accounts easily and almost instantaneously. The Twitter feed is simple - simply select the post to Twitter field (within your blog entry); and then the first time you ever do it it will ask you for all your detail; then from then on - all you need to do is select the box and it will instantly send a Tweet to your Twitter account.
Facebook is a little different. You will need to find an RSS app that you like (there are plenty available if you simply do a search in Facebook for "RSS") then input the blog's RSS Feed information into the app. This will cause your Facebook Business Page to update with your latest blog post automatically, adding the post to your followers' walls. If this sounds a little tricky, don't worry, we can help you with it.
Then make sure each of your social media presences feed each other. Commonly you will need to use "apps" or applications that are third party created and allow your Twitter to update your Facebook, LinkedIn and back again. Doing a search in your social media accounts will bring up a list of apps you can use to achieve all sorts of feeds and linkages.

4. Position your business as an industry expert

What: Basically, this is where you make yourself or your business look like the expert in your industry - the person with their fingers on all the buttons.

Why: It builds your business' credibility. When your potential customers are choosing between you or your competitor, and all factors like price and quality are the same, they are going to choose the person who looks like they know the most about their industry. Therefore, you need to make yourself look like the expert above all others.

How: By posting blogs regularly about your industry, products or updates you are going to look like a wealth of information. Has there just been a new technological advance in your field of speciality? Then write a blog post about it and how it will affect your customers. Is there a new tax rebate available for people who buy the products you sell. Write a blog post. Are you about to launch a new product? You know what to do - write a blog post.

5. Give your Brand Personality

What: Personality goes beyond your choice of branding or colours. It's the whole modus operandi behind your company. It's how the individuals combine to create the living, breathing entity that is your business.

Why: People make purchase decisions based on emotion and buy off people. It's not purely emotion of course, but emotion certainly plays a large role and when it comes to the crunch between you and a competitor, they'll go with the company they like. Sometimes you need to show off a bit of personality in order to get people to like your company in the same way that they like a work colleague, or the guy they buy their lunches from.

How: Blogs give you the opportunity to show off your company's personality by allowing you to post short, succinct and catchy messages (as well as images) about your team, work events, industry related information or trivia. If you have a compassionate business personality, you can post about your recent charity involvement, or issues you are passionate about. If you are a funky company, you might like to take photos of quirky or unusual items around the office a write a few blog posts about the office environment. Blogs can do all this.

6. Keeps your website fresh

What: Keeping your website fresh is about regularly posting new content, or updating old content, to ensure your website is always up-to-date.

Why: As mentioned earlier, regular website updates assist with you SEO. They also help encourage people back to your website more often. Stale website content is the kiss of death. People who want to do business with you are looking for the most up-to-date business. A website with an active blog is just the recipe for a powerful online presence. The simplicity of updating content in your blog will encourage you to add new, fresh content and keep your pages updated as well.

How: One of the easiest ways of keeping your blog updated is to have a few contributors. This takes the pressure off one person, and allows for the blog to have many unique voices, rather than itself becoming stale as the main contributor tires. You may have people in the office with different expertise and you can classify your blog entries dependant on these fields. A means of logging and tracking blog ideas will also help fuel creative energy into the blog and allow you to update it regularly.

The Advantages of a the Bloomtools Blog Manager

The Bloomtools Blog Manager is one of the easiest to use and effective blogs available. It integrates seamlessly with your Bloomtools Third Generation Website and is the preferred blog manager of many large companies including:

With a Bloomtools Blog you can:

Tweet your Blog entry to your Twitter followers
Encourage viral marketing with all the major social media syndication buttons including the Tweet button, Like button and Google +1 button.
Feed your blogs entries into your Facebook or other social media account using the Feedburner RSS Feed.
Allow for Facebook commenting
Organise (Tag) your blog entries into categories, allowing people to easily find the content they want
Moderate comments on each bog post
Add images to your blog posts
Have unlimited number of posts

If you're wanting to add a Blog Manager to your Bloomtools website, all you need to do is Contact Us today and we'll get started. If you don't have a Bloomtools website, but want one, speak to one your local Bloomtools Consultant for a free appointment to discuss your website needs.