Marketing Ninja

If you read my previous article on how Blogs are not just a fad you’re probably interested in learning how blogs can help you improve your business.

Once you’ve determined that your business is in need of expanding its audience online, blogging can help you in a number of areas of business development, customer relations, driving sale, and public relations management.

In this entry we are going to cover some of the basics on how blogging can help you develop your business; we’ll release a series of more in-depth articles as we move along through the Blogging for Business campaign.

Blogging Improves Search Engine Rankings

To quote Movable Type’s page on the benefits of blogging for small businesses:

Because blogs are updated frequently, blogs are favored in search engine listings. 83% of companies that have launched blogs saw both a traffic increase to their website and received more qualified traffic from their blogs.

This is one of the few areas where a small company’s marketing efforts are often on a level playing field with the biggest companies in the world.

No matter how much money a global corporation has to spend, the content that’s most interesting and relevant is going to be favored by search engines. That means you can outmaneuver them on that first page of Google results for your product or service, just by blogging about topics that people want to link to.

In a subsequent post we will outline the mechanisms that blogs use for facilitating discussion and building large amounts of internal and external links to your content in the process, which is what ultimately yields the improved search engine placement.

Blogging Expands Your Reach

Blogging software comes packaged with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) publication mechanisms which enables your blog’s content to be found in places where potential leads may already be looking, such as email applications like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird, popular internet start pages like Pageflakes, Netvibes, iGoogle, or Live.com.

Don’t under estimate the power of online start pages; influential blogger Aaron of Dadviser uses Netvibes to leverage marketing and use data on all of his blogging brands. In my recent interview with Pageflakes CTO Omar AL Zabir Omar introduced us to the concept of Pagecasts, which allows users to share their start public pages with Internet users. There are over 130,000 Pagecasts in existence; AjaxNinja even has one.

Even web browsers are including features for RSS syndication, such as Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature.

Blogging Humanizes Your Company

Blogging establishes relationships between real employees in your company (the blog writers) and your customers or potential customers. By putting human names, personalities, and transparent writing styles on the face of a corporation you can effectively communicate to your audience the message that your company truly cares about the happiness of its customers.

By giving your customers a human experience with your company, you will establish trust and loyalty in ways that were impossible prior to the advent of blogging.

Blogging Develops Customer Loyalty and Defends You Against Bad Press

In my previous article Blogging for Business: Blogs are not just a fad, I mentioned the horror story Geek Squad faced after it got buried in a landslide of bad press resulting from a number of customer service atrocities reported by The Consumerist. Given the gravity and frequency of the charges and the convincing evidence provided by The Consumerist, it’s unlikely that blogging would have saved Geek Squad from being utterly humiliated by the blogosphere.

However, had Geek Squad utilized blogging to start discussion over the customer service issues long back when the issues were an anthill rather than a mountain, chances are that Geek Squad could have started making potential customers aware of the strides it was taking to resolve its customer service issues. Geek Squad could have saved a lot of face by reacting to the first piece of bad press early on; however it chose to wait until there was no more face to save.

Gap is an example of a company trying to do the right thing when bad press hits; rather than ignore The Consumerist, they are trying to respond to the criticisms honestly, and this really does resonate with readers when done correctly.

By listening and responding to customer feedback posted on your blog, you can continue to build upon your human relationship with your audience and develop trust. If readers of your blog see that you take your customers’ feedback seriously and sincerely then you will create customers for life.

If customers see that their feedback made its way directly into your product as an additional feature or an improvement, the new product ultimately becomes their product too! Now you’ve created customers for life.

Now imagine how those customers for life are going to react when another blog, perhaps a competitors or an independent site like The Consumerist, attacks your company or your product. The blog in question has unwittingly attacked your customers, and you can bet your loyal customers are not going to be happy about an attack on a product built from their feedback, because it’s their product too.

Your customers for life will be the first ones to rush to your company’s defense on the blogosphere when bad press hits, so long as you have properly maintained a relationship of trust, transparency, openness, sincerity, and respect when interacting with them.

Blogging is an Inexpensive Way to Publish

If blogs were expensive then you can bet that there wouldn’t be 1.4 new blogs every second. Blog publication tools like Wordpress and Movable Type are lightweight content management systems and take significantly less time to update than a corporate website; in addition, those blogging tools have a number of utility plug ins and presentation themes available to help reduce the amount of time you spend administering the website.

Creating a new entry on a blog is simply a matter of writing the copy, including all the links and images, and pressing that lovely publication button. There’s no HTML editing, no modifying or adding links, nothing; it’s all handled automatically by the blogging engine.

Blogging Establishes Your Company as an Authority in its Domain

The most popular blogs for a given domain are the blogs written by the greatest authority within the domain; this is why Technorati, the blogging search engine, ranks blogs by authority rather by relevancy like how Google does. By visually demonstrating your company’s expertise in its domain for your readers, you will be able to establish your organization as an authoritative source for that domain.

Readers only know what they see, so make sure that your organization does a good job making them see how truly excellent you are. Impressive demonstrations, use cases, feature previews, white papers, are all excellent ways of visualizing excellence for your customers and readers, and the more excellent you are, the more inherently authoritative you are in your domain.

The more authoritative you are, the more less authoritative bloggers in your domain will link to you.

For instance, if I am running a brand new blog on surfing, I am going to want to establish for my readers that I operate in the same domain and category as the really popular (authoritative) blogs on surfing. By linking to those popular surfing blogs I have effectively branded myself as another surfing blog. I am effectively borrowing a small piece of the authoritative blog’s brand simply by linking to it, since other surfers who read surfing blogs will have likely be familiar with the popular surfing blogs, thus those readers will see that my blog’s content falls into the same category. This may even pique their interest.

But as to how this relates to your business, you want smaller blogs in your domain to link to you as it establishes your authority; if the majority of the surfing blogs in the world link to your surfing blog, then you’ve established yourself as the most authoritative blogger on surfing in the world. By establishing yourself as the leader in your domain, you will automatically have a greater amount of word-of-mouth traffic in addition to a greater number of external links pointing to your blog, which is great for those search engine rankings.

Further Reading:

• Movable Type: Benefits of Blogging for Small Business
• Business Week: Blogging Will Change Your Business
• Microsoft Small Business Center: 5 ways blogging can help your business

 

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