Educational Grants

Blogging is big business right now, everyone has a blog from the big guys at Microsoft to next-door's angry teenager. It's quick, it's easy and it's a great marketing tool for a business.

Business blogging can be used to keep customers and visitors up to date on what's going on in a business, what's coming up, general chit-chat that doesn't fit anywhere else on the company site but might be interesting. It also brings a personal feel to the site when it's done right.

No matter how corporate and professional the web site may be, business blogging should be kept on a conversational level. It's an informal contact that can be used to communicate and to sell at the same time. Keep up with comments made from visitors and reply to them if necessary - it shows that their comments are valued and they'll likely return.

It doesn't always have to be the guy in IT who does the blog just because it's a technical thing. Anyone can write it, it's the person who knows what they are talking about on that particular subject that makes the blog work.

Link to other blogs and articles of interest around the web if it's appropriate to. Linking is a big feature of blogs and it can encourage return links. Use trackbacking, if possible, a form of notifier between blogs to say they've been commented on. This kind of networking can provide both valuable visitors and some good links to feed the search engines with.

Linking the blog to an RSS feed is a good idea too, as it will automatically tell interested parties when it's updated, to save them having to keep checking back. They may even forget to occasionally, so a gentle prod will bring them back to keep up with the news.

The regularity of a blog is important, therefore it needs to be thought out before setting it up to make sure there will be things to say. Try to set a regular sort of time for postings. Daily, every three days, every week, it doesn't really matter as long as it is regularly updated - that is the point of a blog.

The search engines will read the blog and will like it for being kept up to date. So, make sure to get a few keywords in there without going overboard and it will know the content is relevant to the site, helping keep it's spiders busy and listing positions as high as possible.

If a business blog should not work out for any reason, collect pertinent posts for a news archive and close the blog gracefully over a period of time rather than immediately, making sure to inform regular users.

And finally, enjoy it! People will know if the blog is enthusiastic or if it's being done as a chore - guess which one they will prefer to read.

Julie-Ann Amos is a professional writer and business consultant. She has over 14 books published in many countries. She runs Exquisite Writing, a large freelance writing agency that produces a wide variety of articles, web pages, website contents, books and ebooks as well as daily/weekly/monthly blogging services for an international client base. Topic experts available for a wide range of subject areas, such as blogging.

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