Your Business Can Succeed in Blogging, Too!

It's pretty well known that a blog can do two things for your business. First, it provides an excellent opportunity to present fresh content on a regular basis (and just as you like fresh vegetables, search engines LOVE fresh content). Second, it provides an excellent opportunity to interact with your customers.

However, it takes a little bit of skill and determination to make the most of these opportunities. In this post, I aim to help you take the right steps to ensure successful blogging.

First and foremost, you need to remember that blogging is not about PR and marketing. Blogging, like any other form of social media, is about engaging your customers in conversation. The goal here is not to sell your latest product, but rather to keep your customers coming back for relevant information. People know a sales pitch when they see one and tend to shy away from them.

That said, it should be obvious that you need to be human. Humans are going to be reading your blog, and they expect to be engaging with a human. If you only think about the search engines, the search engines will pick up on it and penalize you for it. So stay in human form on your blog and write just as if you were speaking to someone in the same room.

Keep in mind that when you engage your customers through social media, you invite all kinds of feedback into the open world, including the negative. This is probably the #1 thing that keep businesses away from blogging (and/or any other forms of social media). Be ready to accept the negative feedback and use it to improve your business.

I know that some of you are probably saying "well, I'll just turn of the comment feature". If that is you, scroll up and read sentence 2 of paragraph 3. To prohibit your customers from participating in the conversation totally defeats the purpose of social media. Remember, social media is about conversation, and conversation is a two-way street.

So how exactly should you deal with comments on your blog? That is up to your business. Your business should put together a policy of what type of comments deserve follow-ups, what requires deletion, etc. On comments that require deletion, remember that your website is your property, and it is up to you as a business owner to choose what is or isn't allowed to be said on your property. That said, I would leave the negative comments public and follow-up to attempt to remedy the issue that was brought up. Reacting negatively to a negative action only achieves more negative results. In other words, two negatives make a bigger negative.

Finally, you should promote your blog anywhere you can. Promote it on Facebook and Twitter. Encourage readers to share your blog with their friends via tools such as AddThis. Let customers you meet face to face or over the phone know that your website has a blog. Mention your blog in your emails. The more people that you can attract to read your blog, more people will get referred by friends, and more people will convert into sales. You blog may even help establish you as an authority in your field.

I encourage any small business owner reading this to try following the advice in this post. It might be the greatest enhancement you could make to your website.