How Your Business Can Benefit From Blogging

Posted in: Blog, Blogging by Althea Tan on May 28, 2010 | No Comments

Blogging has been steadily rising in importance since its inception a decade ago. Back then, blogs were no more than static pages constantly updated by the blogger by editing the HTML code. WordPress and Blogger were not available to make the blogger’s work easier.

Now, blogging has become a common activity — thanks to new technology that made it easier for bloggers to create mini sites of their own, complete with pages for a business blog, an ‘about’ section, a contact form, and even a mini directory of links to other web pages.

Is there a market for your business blog?

In a 2008 study by eMarketer, the number of U.S. bloggers will increase more or less 2 million every year. As this number increases, so will the number of blog readers. By 2013, the number of blog readers is set to increase by 10%.

Having a business blog in your corporate marketing strategy can be very beneficial for both the company and its customers. The blog serves as an online public relations medium for corporate news, press releases, and even personal messages from the company’s executives.

More than that, a business blog maintains a well-balanced relationship between the company and its customers: it serves as the avenue for the company to answer questions, assist new clients, and address complaints from customers. Constant communication between company and its consumers brings out issues early on. This gives the company time to fix the problem and avert a possible PR disaster. Read more…

How to Set Up the Perfect Blog for Your Business

Posted in: Blog, Blogging by Althea Tan on May 17, 2010 | 1 Comment

There is a coffee shop in the East Bay that I like to go to, almost every week. I met so many people there from all walks of life and we usually end up talking about what we do for a living. One lady, who just embarked on business blogging, asked me, “How can create a perfect business blog and get as many people to read it?” I decided to address that question on today’s blog entry.

For many businesses, a perfect business blog should be a turnkey solution for customer relations and public relations management: it should have all the bangs and whistle and should work in favor of the company’s interests.

It should be obvious to anyone that this describes a general concept a perfect business blog but it does not specify how the business blog becomes perfect for the company. The following steps should clarify that, and share substantial advice for executives who blog:

Choosing the CMS and website design

First, a business blog should be easy to maintain for people who have some degree of technical skills, but are not computer experts. The availability of free WordPress themes as well as the increasing number of web design agencies that focus on WordPress website development make this possible.

Pre-packaged themes for CMS like WordPress makes setting up the perfect business blog easy for all types of bloggers. These themes come with plugins and additional features to ensure your business blog functions well, even with little technical maintenance.

However, a perfect business blog needs more than a good theme and a great site design. Your customers read your blog to find something of value, and that means it needs to pack some useful information. Read more…