Do You Need a Business Blog?

It seems everyone with a website has been told they need a business blog. I agree that a blog may help you to market your business and can be used to drive traffic to your website. You need to know what you’re trying to accomplish. Having your webdesigner add a page to your website and posting press releases once a week is not a good use of your time.

The first thing you need to analyze is your website. If you’re going to promote your website to be “above the fold”, it needs to be effective. You want them to buy something, even if it’s buying into your point of view.

• Is your landing page cluttered?
• Do you have a call to action on your landing (home) page?
• How easy is it to buy your product?
• Do you have an offer that will allow you to capture e-mail addresses, then do you have a newsletter to keep in touch with your new customers?
• Do you have Google Analytics (or another product) installed and have you analyzed the data you collect?
• What’s your conversion rate, where are your customers coming from? Which pages are your customers reading?
• What products are your customers buying? (or not buying)

If you don’t know the answers to most of those questions, you may need to make changes to your website to take advantage of the new customers/business you attract using a blog.

Depending on your business, you may not even need a static website. A hosted WordPress blog can be customized to accomplish the same objectives as a static website. Howard Olsen’s High Output Business Training site is a good example of the effective use of a customized Word Press blog theme. Using a Word Press theme allows you to make changes quickly. It’s built in … you don’t need to pay extra, or learn yet another application, or pay a web designed to make the changes to content.

Blogging can be time consuming and you need to post to your blog three to five times a week. If you don’t have the time, or don’t enjoy writing, you can hire someone to write your blog for you. You can also encourage someone from within your organization to write the blog.

Once you’re comfortable with your website, you need to define the goals for the blog. Is it to drive new traffic to your website, or to increase sales from your current customers, to capture e-mail addresses, or to sell your e-book?

Do you need a business blog? Almost every business can benefit by using a blog, but you need a strategy to take advantage of a powerful marketing tool.

Do you have a strategy for your business blog? How successful has it been achieving your goals?