Blogging Benefits and Helpful Tips

by John Phelan

November 16, 2009

Over the past ten years blogging has become an integral part of social media. It is an extremely valuable tool to have for every business. Blogging is a way for you to communicate with your clients about new products, services or promotions. It can also be a source for the latest industry news. It helps put a face to your company and provides an avenue for questions your visitors may have. Here we will discuss some basic blogging tips, why blogging is beneficial, and show you a couple of good sources to get your ideas.

Interact With Your Clients

Your blog is the voice of your company. You want to provide answers about your product, or solutions to issues consumers may have. Interact with your visitors by responding to the comments they make with comments of your own. You can also ask a question as a blog entry to elicit responses from viewers. Interaction with you and other people who comment keeps them interested and coming back.

Keep it Fresh

Make sure your blog is constantly being updated. Plan on writing at least once a week and include interesting, thought-provoking topics. (If you have trouble, don’t worry; we have some tips at the end of this article). Try and keep your entries related to your industry. If you stray into other areas you risk losing some of your audience. Please include photos and videos in your entries. You don’t have to do this for each entry. Just remember we want to excite our viewers and get them to come back.

Advantages of an Onsite Blog

Aside from discussing your latest product or company news, there are a couple of reasons why you want an onsite blog. Search engines love fresh content and blogs are a perfect way to do provide this. If you are constantly providing new content to your web site, the search engines will visit your site more often. This could mean significant gains in search engine rankings. The other real advantage of having an onsite blog is the visitors are already at the place of business when they are reading your entries. It is likely when they are finished reading your latest topic, they will browse your website to see what you have to offer.

Advantages of an Offsite Blog

Several offsite blog companies have been around for some time. These blogs have established URLs that generate fantastic rankings. If you have a blog on these sites, your chances of being seen are greatly increased. Blogspot.com is my favorite because Google owns it. Whenever you post a blog entry, its entered into Google’s search engine rather quickly. Another exciting advantage is that many of these offsite blogs provide exceptional tools to easily promote your blog. By using widgets for Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, and more you can quickly spread the word about your latest entry.

Bonus: As promised here are a couple great sources for you:
Keyword Research Tools:

These tools provide you with information on key phrases, including search variations and quantity of searches. Sometimes these key phrases are searched by through direct questions. For example, “how fast can a man run?” was searched several hundred times over the past months. If that is related to your industry, then right about it. You can even use that search as the title of your blog entry. There are several free key phrase tools out there. Check out www.adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/. (I believe you have to be a member to use this one, but it’s free).

Google Alerts:

I love this tool. It is incredibly easy to use. All you have to do is type in a topic; choose amongst 5 sources including latest news or other blogs; plug in your email; and decide how often you would like the information sent to you. Now you’ll get the latest news in your industry sent right to your email. You can easily talk about these newsworthy stories and add in your 2 cents. Plus, you become the source of information for your visitors. Its at google.com/alerts.

Really, what are the benefits of Twitter for my company?

by John Phelan

October 7, 2009

Most people say they don’t get Twitter. Why would anyone want to hear about my day-to-day events? This is a very common question and the answer is simple; they don’t. Twitter isn’t about what you had for breakfast, or what big deal you closed this afternoon. It’s about offering your clients something valuable in real-time.

First of all, for those who do not already know, Twitter is a micro-blogging site boasting over 20 million members. Each account allows you to add friends and gain followers. If you have followers, you have an audience that will receive your messages (known as tweets). These tweets are posted in an archive on your Twitter page for anyone to view. Ok, now that we have a basic idea of what Twitter is, let’s discuss three ways this tool can work for your business.

1. As a liaison between you and your clients (or potential clients):

This is a particularly good idea for medium to large corporations since customers basically see them as faceless businesses with no real insight of what consumers want. It’s about interaction here. You can ask your clients about your new product or service and let them tell you what they like and dislike about it. It is important that you respond to your followers. These interactions are often re-tweeted (re-posted on other Twitter accounts) and can spread like wildfire. There are several examples where thousands of tweets are spread from a single message.

2. As a mailing list:

Imagine you are a company that wants to relay some exciting information about a new product or service. Your followers act as a real-time mailing list. Since Twitter gives your followers the opportunity to receive instant tweet texts right from their phone, clients can receive your product updates immediately. You can do promotions, contests, surveys, and much more. This is extremely valuable for ecommerce websites, such as companies who sell several products.

3. As a news or tip feed:

Do you know that Twitter accounts can be set up on RSS feeds? This means followers who deem your content valuable will set up this feed (i.e. google.com/reader). They no longer go to you for information; your information will come to them! Here is a good strategy: In between tidbits of valuable information, post news events, and promos about your company. If you have valuable, useful content, people will add you to their RSS reader.

Bonus:

Twitter acts as a real-time search engine. When you post a tweet, it shows up in the extremely powerful Twitter search. So you don’t necessarily have to have a large group of followers to get the message out there.

Oh, and please, avoid spamming your followers with the same promo every five minutes. You will lose a lot followers this way. Now that you know what Twitter is all about get out there and tweet!