I have been blogging for several years now and am a big proponent of blog use. In fact, last week I was conducting a webinar and got carried away preaching about the importance of company blogging. During the webinar I was asked again if having a blog was “essential” for a company. The questioner wanted to know specifically why I felt having a blog was important and wanted specific examples and ideas of good blogs so they had some direction in their blog planning. In other words – don’t just tell me to have a blog because its important, but tell me why it is important and give me specific examples and ideas of blogs who are doing things the right way. So, I gave my spill of answers. But then I got to thinking if the people who are following me on Twitter had the same or similar answers – and they did! (BTW, I appreciate all of you who answered me).

My Question was:  “Should businesses have a blog?  Why or why not?”

Using Twitter To Research Blogging

Here is the general summary of the Twitter answers above, and I will expand on each one.

1. A platform to be the expert – This is your industry, you have the opportunity to set the bar high. With a little research on places like Twitter, Yahoo Answers and other questions and answer websites, you can figure out what questions people are asking about your industry and provide them with (your) industry standard answers and insights. This is one of the best ways to add much needed content to your site, provide value, and become an expert online in your field. By the way, creating blog posts with this kind of information is one of the best ways to start blogging for those of you who are afraid to get your feet wet.
2. Give your company a personality – Be yourself. If you can come across as an individual who cares, rather then a corporation pushing a product or service it will serve you much better! Let potential customers get to know the person behind the company and trust will follow.
3. Search Engine Optimization – Think about how awesome it would be if you could create a piece of content, and have it indexed and ranking on Google (or other search engines) on the same day. If your website is providing enough value, and has enough trust, this is exactly what can happen. Having a blog gives you more of an opportunity to be found for additional keywords that you normally may not be going after. It is much easier to link to good content inside of blogs too, and we know how important people linking to us is. Blogs have many built in capabilities for sharing content too, which helps with the link building.
4. Help with staying relevant – Don’t just have a blog to have a blog because everyone else is doing it. The goal of your blog should be to help you company be more relevant from an information standpoint. Because, that is what people are looking for these days – news and information from individuals, companies, etc. Your blog is also one of the best facilitators for interacting with and embracing social networks, which in turn allow people to share your content. If you are using blogging platforms like WordPress for example, there are many plugins that make sharing your content and information with others easy. That alone helps you stay relevant, people who use these platforms to find information understand that your blog is an up to date relevant source of information.

These 4 reasons in some form or another really do sum up my feelings as to why online businesses need blogs. Of course there could be more advanced additional answers that might include… push viral content , syndicate videos, etc. But we need to take baby steps, and for now you I think that if you can both understand and start to implement the above 4 things, you will be setting out on the right path!

I am just the one you hired to do your Internet Marketing – what do I know?

I can’t tell you how many times last week the question – where to host a company blog? – came up in my conversations with potential clients.  Besides being free, I really don’t see what the draw is to Blogger, Typepad, WordPress or any of the free hosted blogging sites.  If you already own a website, and have hosting space somewhere, then getting a blog set up on your own server is just as free.  I use the free WordPress blogging software for all of my blogs (including this one) and love it.  You can completely customize it and make it look exactly like your existing website.

Most owners of major businesses that I have talked to just don’t understand the reasons (or benefits) for having a blog hosted on their own site, and that is why the explore the only options they have heard of.  I hope to better explain some of those reasons here with this post, and provide the insight you may need to make better corporate choices – or convince the people that may be making it harder on your to make a decision.

Get Educated

Having a blog hosted on your own server under your own domain is going to have more benefits then anything a free one could provide.  There are several reasons for this, but the main benefit you will see from a self hosted blog is the search engine love it will bring.  If you are running a blog that is faithfully updated, and sharing good information that people are actually looking for (value) then the search engines will keep coming back to your site more often to get an updated index of your entire site. You are giving them reasons to keep coming back and getting that fresh cache of your site.

Think about it this way – Lets say you have identified 10 competitors (real competitiors) that you found on Google, and you think will be hard to compete against.  Now out of those 10 competitors only 2 of them have blogs that are self-hosted (on their own domain).  The other 8 have no blogs at all, no updated content and no reason for the search engines to keep coming back to them.  If you have a blog that is regularly updated then it will be much easier to compete against those other 8.  SO by doing that you already have eliminated 80% of your competition.  That leaves you needing to do a better job at blogging and providing information then the other two that do blog.  I have also seen from most major company blogs that they are not updating very often – maybe a few times a month, and all they are posting about is boring press or official stuff that should never be on a blog.  If that is the case with these other two blogs, then it is going to be very easy to compete…

IF YOU DO IT RIGHT

If you could find a way to update your blog about 5 times a week (at the least) then you will have elimiated most of the competition and you will (in time) become a trusted source if not the most trusted source depending on your niche.  It also depends on the content you provide, and I am hoping and assuming you will be providing good content – remember my post the other day about blogging ideas for a boring industry.

The Nuts and Bolts Of It:

short version -

• bad – mynextpicnic.blogspot.com, mynextpicnic.wordpress.com
• good – mynextpicnic.com/blog

long version -

Let me spell it out for you.  If you have a site selling picnic baskets and are thinking about setting up a blog on a free blogging site, your URL will be (I am just using these as examples only) picnicbaskets.blogspot.com or picnicbaskets.wordpress.com (and so on) and any marketing you do of that blog will be providing more trust and love for the blogspot or wordpress domain – and believe me – they don’t need anymore love then they already are getting from the search engines.  If you are wanting to set it up right – Lets say your domain name is mynextpicnic.com it would be best to create a directory (not subdomain – my preference) called “blog” so it would look like this – mynextpicnic.com/blog (not blog.mynextpicnic.com) – By doing this, you are hosting the blog on your own site, and any marketing you do for you blog, or any of your content that go hot on social networks will be credited to you and not the other free hosted blogging services.  Setting up the directory is just my presonal preference, but even setting up the blog under a sub domain would do more for you then a free hosted blog somewhere else.  I have run a few of my own tests that show I can gain additional brand rankings for directories easier then additional rankings and spots for sub-domains.

More Links

With all the (blah blah blah) talk about no more buying links, you still need links to rank well, so how are you going to get more?  Here’s an idea – If you are pushing good content and stories that could go viral, and do well on social networks – you will get links.  You will get people talking about your stories, and linking to you as reference.  So – how much better for your company is it going to be if the links are pointing to YOUR domain, and NOT the free hosted blog domains?  It is going to make all the difference in world when it comes to traffic, bounce rate, return visitors, rank etc. and the most important thing here – making more sales.

Thoughts?

Pardon the fun title (you either get it or you don’t, but I am leaving it there) - I guess I should have asked - Are you a two post chump that gives up on blogging after only posting twice during an entire month, one of which was a press release?  You walk away saying, blogging is not a good fit for our company, it did nothing for us.  If this is you, and you find yourself saying this – you are absolutely right to walk away, you two post chump.

If you wanna redeem yourself, and figure out where you may have gone wrong, then keep reading.  I honestly did not want to post about this today, but after reading a post talking about only 16% of consumers trusting corporate blogs it got me thinking, and it got me a little irritated.

Why Blog?

I love blogging, and I know I am not the best at it, but in my posts, I am always trying to provide useful information that gets people to act, and engage (besides just informing).  I try to provide information that is real and can help people make choices about what they are looking for (no matter what it is).  I have other blogs that I run then just this Internet marketing blog here, I have other corporate blogs that do well.  I have had many people, on many occasions tell my sales guys that it is because of the information on the blog that they went ahead an made the purchase.  That’s all I need to hear to keep blogging.

Why Do People Fail At Blogging?

I think the reason that only 16% of people trust corporate blogs is because only a small percentage of corporate blogs are doing it correctly.  I have spoken to many of these corporate types that have told me they tried blogging, but it just didn’t work for them.  I try to dig a little deeper to find out what they were really doing with the blog, and come up with a reason why I think it failed.  Most of the time these big corporate types (IMO) have no clue about social media, and the only thing they have heard about related to social media is that MySpace is a place where child molesters hang out.

I find out that they used their blog as a place to share the company press releases, official statements or policies, and looked at me with a clueless stare when I asked them if their blog was optimized for social media.  All of this equals a fail in my book, especially when they have given up on their corporate blog that hey have been running for only two months, and have a total of 4-6 posts.  That will never cut it my friends.

One of my buddies, Nate Moller from Moller Marketing, who teaches people how to start an online business, recently had the chance to interview Shoemoney (a huge name in the blogging community) and asked him if people running a corporate blog should be personal or professional (ie; press, official news etc) and he said they should 100% be personal and leave all the press release BS out.  People don’t know how to connect with sites that aren’t personal, and that don’t provide real information that can help them make decisions, and act.

Tips for Running A Successful Corporate Blog:

1. Be personal – This is the most important step, and without doing this – everything else you do on your blog will be a failure.  Let your readers get to know you, and the people behind the company.  They want to trust you, so help them trust.  The most trustworthy online referral method is getting an email from people you know, 77% in fact – so this should be an eye opener how important trusting an individual is, and the only way you will gain trust is by being personal.
2. Know your target audience - Don’t create a blog thinking you are going to appeal to everyone in the world.  Understand what your industry and niche is, and write for those people and not the masses.  If you keep your writing niche specific and direct to your audience, your blog will experience HUGE success.
3. Provide useful information that gives people reason to act – If you are just throwing up posts because you know Google likes content, then again you have just failed.  If you are paying to things like your web analytics, then you know what people are looking for, and this can give you a better idea of what to blog about.  If you go and look at any article site, or Yahoo Answers (as example) you will see the questions that real consumers are asking.  All you need to do is to be the one that provides that information.
4. Be honest – If you are sharing testimonials, and reviews then make sure they are real and from real people who have used your services.  My father-in-law bought something from one of my websites a while ago and the question he made to me was; “Are all those testimonials real?”  He thought they were, and felt good about my business, but he stated that most he reads seem made up and fake.  I think people can usually sniff that kind of stuff out.
5. Speak whats on your mind - Be open with your readers.  You are never going to make 100% of the people happy 100% of the time, and you just have to learn to deal with that.  Many of my greatest posts that got the most people linking to them, brought the most traffic, and the ones that rank the best are those that had a little controversy associated with them.  You also need to learn to grow thick skin, especially if you start writing stuff that is good enough and worthy to show up on the bigger social networks like Digg.  NO matter what, there will always be someone that wants to argue with you, they get off on that, so just get ready and don’t let it effect you!
6. Be consistent – You are not going to be able to gain readers, or trust if you are not constantly giving people reasons to come back to your blog and read more.  If you are posting everyday, and people know they can come back to you for reliable, useful information, and that you will have new posts, then that is a GOOD thing, and you have not failed.  When you do it for this reason, it has a positive effect with the search engines.  If they have reasons to keep coming back to your content everyday because you are adding, and they want to make sure they have the latest index of your site, that too is a GOOD thing.  Just make sure you are doing it for the right reasons.
7. Give them information they can act on – If you know what people are looking for in your industry, and you provide them that exact information they are looking for, then give them options based on what you offer, they will act on those options.  They are already invested on your site (and hopefully trust you by now) and will more then likely purchase from you once all their research is done.
8. Be real - You can have fun with your posts, and provide information while making people smile.  All of your posts don’t have to be exactly related to your site and business.  Once you figure out the balance, this will boost your blogs credibility times ten!

In conclusion

There are many other things that could be on this list, but I feel these are the most important for now.  Remember, I did not intend on writing this post, I just felt like I needed to (for my sake).  Don’t be a two post chump and give up on your corporate blog that easily.  There is power in blogging and getting the right information in front of the right people.

Bloggers need to start thinking differently if they want to be noticed.  I don’t have any problem with link bait (I preach it), and doing what you can to be picked up by sites like Digg, but blogging, and having a corporate blog goes far beyond the hopes of one of your stories making the FP of Digg.  Think about your customers, and what kind of information they are looking for.  If you can be the blog that provides them with what they are looking for, and gain their trust – it will be a great day for you, and your company!