The Business of Blogging - Part 2: Benefits of Blogging

Business owners of traditional, non-Internet companies have struggled over the last ten years to come up with an Internet strategy for their businesses that makes sense. Today, business owners face the same questions when it comes to company blogs as they did with web sites. Do companies need to have blogs in order to stay competitive in the marketplace? The short answer is that while not every company can directly benefit from a blog, if their competitors are blogging, they really need to think about blogging for business.
So what are business blogs good for? Blogs are not the best medium for
straight-forward, rarely-changing corporate information. A small marketing web site serves that purpose. Blogs are also not the ideal format as online catalogs to sell products. Blogs can, however, be the perfect forum for publishing current company news or presenting timely information about products in an online catalog or adding compelling content to enhance the image of a company or products.

Blogging a Message

An example of a company blog that enhances a company site is Stonyfield Farm. In fact, the company has three blogs. The Bovine Bugle (www.stonyfield.com/weblog/BovineBugle/) features news from an organic farm that supplies Stonyfield with milk. This blog helps establish some history and interesting background about hormone free dairy products and their benefits.  Taking buseinss blogging a step further, Stonyfield Farm also publishes more lifestyle oriented blogs that serve their market demographic with useful information that goes beyond simply organic products and farming. Baby Babble (www.stonyfield.com/weblog/BabyBabble/) includes parenting conversations from Stonyfield Farm employees with small children. Strong Women News Daily (www.stonyfield.com/weblog/StrongWomenDailyNews/) features women's fitness and health tips as well as women's issues news. The company also has a blog for one of their community programs called Creating Healthy Kids (www.stonyfield.com/weblog/CreatingHealthyKids/) providing information about changing the way kids eat across our country and in public schools.
Ease of Use

Because blogging tools are Web-based and posting to a blog is as easy as typing a title and content into designated field on a Web page and hitting a submit button, even the least technical person in a company can blog. The post can either appear as a draft for further review and approval and then submitted to publish on a blog or it can be published immediately for the public to see.

Editing blog posts is also streamlined. Each post appears as a list to anyone with administrative privileges, that is, anyone who is allowed to post to and edit the blog. By clicking on a link to the published post, edits can be made even after the post has been made public, if needed. Posts can also be deleted, however, the most posts in a blog archive, the more useful the blog. Archived posts appear automatically upon publishing and can be archived by date such as day, week or month and on many publishing tools, posts can also be archived by topic or category.

The idea behind business blogging is to have fresh, current content that provides something useful or compelling to a target audience. Not every business is prepared to become a publisher or to hire a person to be the designated company "blogger." Many blog tools allow multiple bloggers or "members" of a blog making it easy to divvy up writing and publishing duties. However, giving more than one person the responsibility for company blogging can also prove to be challenging if guidelines and policies are not in place.

Blogging Products

Selling directly off a blog is not common right now but linking to places to buy products within blog content is becoming more prevalent. A products blog such as the one for VB Cosmetics (http://vbcosmetics.blogspot.com/) will strategically link to product pages within the VB Cosmetics online store (https://vbcosmetics.com/store/) within text about skincare, self-care, and beauty. While some posts go into detail about specific products, more of them discuss about an issue and then reference a product while still other posts focus more on beauty and lifestyle issues that convey the overall company philosophy about health and well being. The VB Cosmetics blog is clearly but creatively being used as a marketing tool for their products site.

Choosing the right blog style can help determine the blog's effectiveness. Because blog content can be taken in many directions, finding the right style and voice is important to creating a successful product marketing blog. Many blogs take a diary format while others take a news announcements format. Some blogs read like an ongoing discussion and others, for all intents and purposes, read like an online publication. Each style could be useful to promote a company or products, however, making the determination on blog style needs to happen before the company blog goes up.

Consultant Blogs

One group of business people who can benefit from blogs is consultants. Blogs can bring exposure and credibility to a consultant if it is well-written and well-marketed blog. Consultants in virtually any industry can benefit - from marketing, financial, and technical to organizational, design, and motivational.

Most consultants who are using blogs have to find a balanced and manageable way of providing useful advice to readers without "giving away" too much advice for free. By blogging, consultants can provide useful and relevant advice and information at no cost to readers of the blog, however, the payback will hopefully materialize in a reasonable amount of time by generating new clients.

An example of consultants using blogs include a law firm management consultant who provides valuable resources and boosts his credibility at LawBiz (www.lawbizblog.com/) and a health care strategist who showcases his expertise at The Healthcare Blog (www.thehealthcareblog.com).

With all the easy-to-use tools and automated features of blogging, a blog can surpass a web site in only a matter of weeks because it is realistic to publish current content frequently and build up a significant archive of content in a short amount of time.

Whether you are looking to build a blog for communicating, marketing or selling, always remember to set goals, identify your market and find your niche to ensure a successful blog. Don't let unrealistic expectations of wealth and fame get in the way of the practical benefits of business blogging.