Blogging continues to become more than just a stand-alone marketing tool, but also a business model integral to promoting a company’s online reputation, increasing social media engagement, and driving revenue and growth. Business blogging is one of the potent methods that help companies interact and engage with online users and identify which practice is best to expand and strengthen consumer reach.
A business blog is online content that represents a company’s profile. It acts as a visual showroom – an information center that engages online users and prospects into a company’s products, services, and philosophy. A corporate blog isn’t a sheer composition of ideas and thoughts; it isn’t a business blurb meant to bore consumers with wishy-washy talk. In writing a business blog, a writer must have a content strategy pointed towards satisfying potential consumers, primarily, and Google, secondarily. Bloggers may commit the mistake of writing solely to boost page rankings – gearing it for search algorithms, and sacrificing the quality of the content as a result. This practice is more or less a black hat strategy that can hurt an internet marketing campaign.
Blogging, as a marketing blueprint, requires best practices. At bare minimum, bloggers should create compelling, informative, and relevant content that creatively sells a brand. This strategy doesn’t mean that a brand should be shoved down the reader’s throat. A good business blog is one that online consumers want to read up to the last sentence instead of skimming through. Bloggers should efficiently optimize the use of keywords so as not to create an impression to the readers that they’re doing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, but instead selling a product face-to-face. The key here is to make the audience want more, encouraging them to click on the links posted in order to satisfy their curiosity.
There has been a lot of talk about how micro-blogging – the use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter – is replacing traditional blogging and rendering it irrelevant. But it’s reasonable to say that business blogging is here to stay, and it will continue to influence internet marketing and search engine optimization strategies. In fact, the business of blogging has entered a new phase, with bloggers becoming more like journalists or ambassadors representing a brand to the online community at large.
Sources:
http://socialmediab2b.com/2009/06/business-blogging-best-practices/
http://www.probloggingtips.net/blog-commenting-strategy-for-building-online-repuation.html
http://sbinformation.about.com/cs/ecommerce/a/bblogs.htm