The Internet has provided business owners/operators with the ability to communicate with their customers about products, issues dear to the company about the company itself. This type of communication often results in relationship building with customers. The stronger the relationship, the more likely customers will remain loyal and keep coming back to purchase more product(s).

Blogs

A business’ blog is a key mode of communication with customers. When handled in the proper manner, a blog is often able to help a company build both its brand as well as its reputation. Better brand recognition and a solid reputation are the key components needed to increase sales and ultimately profits. For smaller companies without a significant marketing budget, a blog is a cost-effective way to sell the company’s virtues and products in a relaxed forum. Unfortunately, far too many small companies are slow to realize the potential benefits of having one. That said, it’s becoming rare to find a large e-commerce retailer that doesn’t have a blog included as part of a sophisticated looking website.

The Effectiveness of a Blog

There are a lot of factors that go into creating an effective blogging environment. As a business/owner operator, it would be worth your time to surf through the websites of some of your major competitors, paying particular attention to the blogs. It should give a good idea of the things that need to be included in yours. While it’s difficult to draw a direct correlation between having a viable blog and the way it might help increase sales activity, it’s becoming clear that not having a blog or having a blog that is being used ineffectively will usually do nothing to improve sales.

Is Your Business Blog Lacking These Key Components?

If you have recently established a blog for your business, you might want to take a serious look at whether or not it is giving your company the desired results. If not, you might be missing out on the benefits of the following components.

1. Write for Your Audience – You don’t want to fill your blog with information that is interesting to you. Blogs are there for the benefit of your customers and you need to write the blog with that in mind. Blogs should do one of three things for the customer:

• Solve a problem
• Answer questions about products
• Provide information about the company and/or the industry

2. Develop a Consistent Frequency – If the audience is aware of the frequency of your blogging efforts, you might find them anticipating the opportunity to read your current blogs. The key is to keep blogging efforts up and blog as frequently as possible. If you have difficulty coming up with subject matter, you might ask for suggestions or set aside some time each month to plan topics for the next few weeks/months at a time. Blogs should be maintained on a daily basis to create constant traffic to the website, but on a weekly basis at a minimum.

3. Blogging Format – You want to create a consistent format for your blogs. It should be a format that reflects the personality of your company without including heavy handed sales pitches. Also, you want to keep the word count to 400-450 words. This is the ideal length to hold the audience’s attention.

4. Blogging Content – You want to avoid posting blogs that are irrelevant to your company, the industry or your products. Your customers want to know what’s going on in your world and they end up underwhelmed if you frequently post off-topic content.

5. Customer Interaction – You blog should be designed to give your customers ample opportunities to respond or provide postings of their own. You won’t always get responses, but as your audience picks up in numbers and starts visiting more often, they will begin to feel more comfortable posting on their own.

6. Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Blogs – Depending on which web-design software you choose, there should be analytical tools available to measure your website’s overall performance. It allows you to tweak things like your blog in order to maximize effectiveness.

7. Sharing – Your audience should have the ability to freely share your blogs with friends and other sites. By doing so, they are giving free exposure for your company, which should eventually translate into additional sales.

If your blog fails to generate further interest in the company and its products, you should take a serious look at your blog and make sure these components are included. If not, you should make the necessary changes and keep on blogging.