SONARconnects

Gone are the days of idle teens and all night web-dwellers posting petty comments alongside relevant articles. Blogging is a sensation that businesses turn to as a method of smart, relevant, and budget-friendly advertising in a careful attempt to navigate their growth and survival. Today’s savvy business owners use blogging as a method of communicating carefully planned and enticing information that is designed to reel in customers.

A shop may communicate a new product, a restaurant–live band night, a bookstore–book signings. Professionals, too, can use blogs to establish credibility or relevancy among their consumer base. Doctors may use it to communicate useful information to their practice such as medical opinions concerning vaccination and autism, or to communicate timely information such as symptoms that should prompt a medical visit when the Swine Flu was spreading throughout the U.S.

But effective blogging takes time, a keen sense of business, and an intuitive approach to what customers need to hear. Hiring a professional to maintain your blog can do wonders for your business and reputation.

The benefits of maintaining a business blog are:

• Search engines will rank you higher based upon your readership and how recently your content was updated. Higher rankings mean more visitors, resulting in more clients and more dollars.
• You can communicate instantly and effectively with your client base, many of whom will come to rely upon your blogs as their information source.
• Clients can reach you about topics relevant to them, providing feedback they may not offer in person.
• You establish credibility and create a connection with your consumers, showing you are an astute and thoughtful human versus a big, inaccessible corporation.
• The casual nature of blogging allows your company to gain recognition for things that may have no place in mainstream advertising. (I.e., charity work, employee profiles, product reviews, industry advice.)
• Blogging communicates the culture of your organization and builds both trust and authority with your readership.

Blogs should always contain:

1. Relevant Information
2. Accurate Communication
3. Timely News
4. Frequent Updates
5. Proper Grammar and Spelling (limited abbreviations)
6. Text that is Casual and Friendly in Tone

Do you have a business blog?  How are you using it as part of your social media strategy?

Leave a comment and include your business blog and I will add it to my blog roll.

Shelly Kent