Blogging
Weblogs in Business
4 Apr 2003
You may have already seen a weblog, or blog—a collection of short writings online organized by date and focused on some topic, but how can they help your business?
You need to communicate with customers, partners, employees, and prospects in order to succeed. A weblog makes Web publishing simple. Weblog software can automatically organize your site, archive postings, and give you an easy way to include links, pictures, and documents on your site.
A weblog gives you an easy way to place information on the Web and have that information be instantly archived, categorized, and searchable.
Weblogs can help your business with marketing, customer retention and attraction, knowledge mangement, team communication, and customer collaboration.
Marketing
A blog can assist your marketing efforts by increasing search engine rankings and building a base of regular readersof your thoughts and visitors to your site.
Search engines—particularly Google—tend to assign a high importance to weblogs, mainly because search engines like sites that are updated frequently and focused on a particular topic. By running a weblog, you will increase your search engine rankings.
Customer retention and attraction
While high search engine rankings are nice, a regular customer base is better. A blog makes it easy to distribute information to customers and prospects. People will keep coming back to read the new content. And the information put in the blog will remain there and be built upon, creating a vast library of information about your business and your market.
This archived content will help potential new customers find you through search engines and links from other sites. Other web sites will often link to things you’ve written. Search engines will have dozens of articles about you and your business to link to, increasing the frequency that your site appears in search listings.
Knowledge Management
Business today thrives on knowledge. The challenge is distributing that knowledge to current and new employees. If you find yourself answering the same questions, or tracking down the person who knows the answers, or trying to recall where you read an important piece of information, a weblog can help.
Posting to an internal weblog can help you and your employees take information from their heads and place it in a place that everyone can see. New employees can read archived entries and become effective more quickly.
Team Communication
Do you have a team that never seems to be in sync? Get everyone on the same page—litteraly. Sales people can share information about the status of a prospect, explain a method they’ve used to overcome an objective, or discuss the best way to sell a new product or service. A tech support team could talk about new bugs, fixes, and work arounds.
A team weblog provides a forum for discussion that is easy to use as email, but is open for the whole team to see and add to. Post links to Web sites that are of interest to the project, announce important issues and news, and share documents online for review.
Weblog benefits
Weblogs are wonderful for attracting new customers through search engines and links to your site, they can distrubute news and information to your customers, and help your employees communicate with each other. They can also serve as a collective backup brain for your business by archiving your business information in an easily searchable form.
All these benefits can be had without the hassles of traditional Web publishing or the expense of content management, knowledge management, or CRM software.
Interested in finding out more about using weblogs in your business? Contact Kalsey Consulting Group, or ask us for a free quote.