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The use of blogs as a personal tool to communicate is not new, there are over 100 million blogs in the so called “blogosphere” covering more topics than most of us even know exist. However it is only recently that small, medium and large enterprise customers have began to launch their own blogs. This is because they are starting to realise the value of having a blog. Not all companies have bought into this yet, so we thought it would be useful to explore what we think are the business benefits for owning a blog.

We’d like to continue to add to this list below, if you think we have missed something; please add to the debate by using our comments section.

Business Benefits of Blogging

Search Marketing purposes

By nature a blog is usually about a specific topic and is regularly updated. This in turn encourages the search engine spiders to visit your site more frequently, once this happens you are more likely to appear the organic search results, which means free and targeted traffic. The more experienced bloggers will target certain keywords and phrases in order to rank well and manipulate the search engines. Because of the flexibility of a blog, it is very quickly to launch a new post and therefore start to rank for different keywords relating to your business.

Direct Contact with people who are interested in you

Most blogs provide an option for its readers to be able to subscribe to them, meaning that every post you go live with will be sent to your subscriber base. These are people who have proactively giving you and your content the virtual equivalent of the thumbs up. You should value your subscribers very highly and ensure that you continue to provide them with content and information they are interested in. Conversely, these are the people you can test new products, seek feedback and leverage to help your provide a better service or product.

Brand Building

There are many ways to use a blog to build your brand or even to support an existing brand. In fact a blog is the perfect vehicle to use to interact with your potential customers, advanced bloggers may also use video or viral campaigns to tease their audience into coming back.

Dare to be different and differentiate yourselves from your competitors

There’s two questions to ask here; do your competitors have a blog and do they use it? And secondly, can we use our blog to add credibility to our services and solutions? For example, if you’re an IT company would it be good to have an interview with one of your customers on your blog?The answer is yes, as it adds to the credibility of your service. Likewise, you could include your views on new product launches or industry trends, all the time differentiating yourselves with other players in your market.

Build Relationships

There’s an old adage in sales and marketing, “people buy from people”. This has not changed and is probably even more apparent in tough economic times. A blog provides you with an opportunity to create relationships with your clients and prospects. There is a current trend for large companies to have a “CEO Blog”, this is where the head of the company writes a blog article once a week, which is designed to bring them closer to their target audience. It provides the reader with a feeling of involvement and interaction, especially if they are able to leave comments and respond directly to the company head.

Social Media Marketing

Most of the leading blog sites will have a social media aspect to them. They are normally visible via small graphical logos, which can be used by your readers to submit your blog post to other social media networks. The more well known social media sites are called Facebook, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Sphinn and Digg, however the list grows by the day and each will be focused on niche or have its own rules. From a blogging perspective, the reason to be aware of the social networks is because if your content is good then it is likely to be picked up by them. If this happens, it can mean a huge increase in targeted traffic.

PR & Media will find you

Depending on your niche and your content, there is every chance that you may be contacted by either local or national press. This is a great position to be in and will help you with brand building and of course provide you with some free advertising. Usually this type of contact is born from the understanding that you are an expert in your field or the topic you are discussing is of interest to their publications.

Thought Leadership and becoming an authority

The Internet has created some amazing opportunities for companies to market their products and services to a wider audience, however you could also argue that it has meant an increase in competition in almost all markets. This is why it is important to differentiate yourself from your competitors, one way to do this is to establish yourself as the de facto expert in your area. If you are an expert, tell the world. Use your blog to communicate and showcase your expertise, in a competitive market this will do wonders for your sales.

Online Reputation Management

Online reputation management is becoming big news, we have posted about this before and we advise our clients to be aware of it and proactively manage it. One of the ways to do this is by managing the content and using your blog to control what is being said. It is a little more complicated than just that, however it is better to be in control of the blog then letting someone else do it for you.

It’s really Simple

Creating and maintaining a blog is very simple. Once it is set up and designed, then your only challenge is creating the content and keeping it updated regularly. There are sites out there that post every day, whilst others do it once a week. We recommend that you find a happy medium that results in a good flow of content to keep your readers happy, without it becoming a chore.

Link Baiting

People have different views and ideas about link baiting. Often it is described as a black hat technique, whilst there are examples of blackhat link baiting, in general it is fine. The idea is that a blog post is so controversial or significant that it solicits a response from other members of the blogosphere. In turn they include a link back to your site, and you receive a boost in traffic and a short term buzz on your blog. If you’re lucky, you will keep hold of a number of your readers as well.

We want to keep growing this list, if you have any other business benefits for having a company blog please post in the comments.