Discover why businesses should blog.
In our newsletter last month we promised to reveal why businesses should blog – and before you panic, a blog is simply a website which is updated regularly and allows interaction with comments from your readers.
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I am sure the mere idea of interactivity is frightening some of our readers! Someone is surely exclaiming ‘What? Letting customers comment on our business? What if they complain?’ Well better they complain there than telling the world and bypassing you entirely – at least you can deal with it on your terms and deal with it well and they will tell the world that!
We’ve been blogging at Morgan PR since 2006 and began after listening to a talk by The Internet Psychologist Graham Jones. He darkly warned the audience of 20, from the now defunct West Berkshire Business Club in Newbury, that of our number, those who did not start blogging, none would be in the same business in five years time. Only two of us are in the same business and we’re the only one blogging. Scary eh?
Actually I blogged during a spell travelling back in 2001 – before the term blog (shortened from web log) was popularised, but that site has long since vanished to protect the innocent and guilty alike!
Blogging should, like all good PR, simply reflect what your business does and ideally should carefully use the key phrases and geographic terms (like Newbury, West Berkshire if you are serving businesses in this part of the Thames Valley) that will help with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that will help Google send customers your way.
Blogging regularly will ensure that search engines frequently index your website and this too will see your website perform above those of competitors who simply build it and ignore it. The five page online brochure is no longer adequate.
Over time it also builds up into a huge e-footprint and if, like Morgan PR, you use individual landing pages for each post – which means each has a unique web address – then each of those can be found by Google. We have almost 500 posts on this blog to date and each can be found by Google, indeed we get enquiries from posts we wrote in 2006, 2007, 2008 and last year - all posts that have long since proven blogging cost effective.
What do you write about? Well there is the challenge! We’ve said it should reflect what you do and we use current affairs, trends and events to illustrate our public relations and social media expertise. If you occupy a particular sector of the marketplace, what would your customers like to know about, crucially what will they want to search for on Google? How about case studies? Events? Guest blog posts from others in your industry? Whatever you do it pays to plan and regular features at a regular time encourage reader loyalty.
Remember also that a blog is the healthiest cornerstone of any social media strategy and blog posts can help populate a newsletter (as this has done!), and appear on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (yes, also done that with this!). All of which drives further traffic to your blog/website.
Morgan PR creates social media strategies for businesses and can offer consultation and support with their implementation. Contact us today if you would like to explore using social media to promote your business.