OUR SERVICES
Contact Info:
Alfalfa Media
contact@alfalfamedia.com
71 Stevenson Street, Suite 400
San Francisco, California 94105
+1-415-658-5991
RECENT TESTIMONIAL:
- "The Alfalfa Media team is really good at search engine optimization (SEO). They ask the right questions and deliver the results. In fact, they have exceed our expectations. Our Grocery Outlet store went from not being found on the Internet for our chosen keyword to being on Page 1 of Google and Bing--both in the Local Business Results (Google Map) and the organic results. Foot traffic to our store has risen. We are pretty sure that we have recouped our SEO investment in less than one month. In short, the Alfalfa Media team is super responsive, takes the time to explain the process in layman's terms, always keeps us in the loop and delivers the goods. So, if you want to be on page one of Google and other search engines, Alfalfa Media is your team.
"
Todd & Debbie , Owners, Grocery Outlet San Leandro
How to Set Up the Perfect Blog for Your Business
Posted in: Blog, Blogging by Althea Tan
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.
What you should blog about
The perfect business blog does not talk about your company, product, or service, day in, day out. Instead, it talks about what your customers want to know, for example, if you own a company that sells pet supplies online, featuring very product your company sells in your business blog is shamelessly tacky, unless you create an online catalogue.
A perfect business blog should dispense useful tips and general information about your company’s industry. Using the previous example, the ideal blog for a pet supplies online store shares tips on animal health, discusses behavioral training for pets, and gives out medical advice on the right pet nutrition.
Space your blog posts in a week instead of posting in spurts. If you do not have the luxury of time to write one blog post each day or every other day, then schedule the posts. This leaves you more time to focus on other aspects of blogging.
Promoting your business blog
The perfect business blog needs to take another step in its birthing process. You already chose the right blogging platform and committed to blogging weekly. (Or, you can also hire an experienced blogger to write blog posts based on your notes and outline.) What’s the next step? By this time, no one yet knows you have a blog. This is the perfect time to let the cat out of the bag.
Promoting a business blog takes a little more time and effort on your part. One area of blog promotion involves creating accounts on popular social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. Setting up ‘Share’ buttons for these sites, and other bookmarking sites, helps spread the news about your business blog. One particular social media plugin that I find extremely useful is Share This. You can see it in action at the bottom of this blog entry.
Another aspect of blog marketing focuses on driving traffic to your site through thousands of links strategically placed on other sites. These links feed value and authority to your business blog, and consequently, push your visibility in the search engine results.
This may sound like a lot of work and you may not be willing to spend most of your time tinkering and optimizing your business blog. Delegating this to someone else takes the additional workload off your shoulders. You may hire a freelance blogger and pay on a per post basis or assign another employee to take care of the blog. That person could already be in your company’s IT or PR department.
Three key areas to focus on
Choosing the CMS and site design will affect the size of the budget for the blog. The right content for your blog needs either hiring a new employee or assigning someone from the IT department. Promoting the blog needs another important decision to make, and that is whether you should hire someone else or assign another.
Setting up the perfect business blog takes more steps than mentioned here, but these are the three key areas that need the most attention and the authority to make the right decisions for the blog.
Comments
I think the “perfect” blog is a myth. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.
We should be aiming for the best blog we can make, rather than unattainable perfection, and I think your tips here are a great place to start.
Comment by Andy @ FirstFound on May 28, 2010 at 7:26 AM