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Not too long ago business owners wondered if they needed a web site. What could an online presence do for their brick and mortar business? Most now see a web site as an essential and integral part of their marketing mix, and the question has become “should I be blogging?”
What’s a blog, anyway?
A blog (short for weblog) is the beginning of a two-way conversation with your readers. It is interactive by nature. You, the blogger, post fresh information on a regular basis. Your readers subscribe via an email form or by RSS feed, allowing them to view your new post immediately. But they can do more than just view your content. Your readers have the ability to comment or ask questions.
How can a blog help your business?
- A blog is an excellent customer education platform.
- Readers subscribe because they want to hear what you have to say. It’s the beginning of a relationship, where your prospect says “tell me more.”
- A well-written, regularly updated blog is a credibility builder because it positions you as an expert on your topic.
- Your blog can/should be a resource, where visitors will come to your blog because you are the source of information they need.
- Search engines love regularly updated content. Your blog (if regularly updated) will be crawled more often than a static web site.
A blog doesn’t have to be limited to words on a page. You can create audio messages, video messages (YouTube, for example), or a photo blog.
You can even micro-blog, thanks to Twitter. Twitter allows only 140 characters per post (called a “tweet”), which is just about right when you want to share just a thought or an amazing web site with your followers. Note my Twitter feed in this blog’s right column, titled “What I’m doing.”
Finally, one of the best aspects of blogging is the ease with which readers can be notified of new posts. You’ll find a link to my RSS feed to the right of this post, as well as at the bottom of the page, but most easily recognized and accessible via your browser’s address bar. See the little orange icon to the right of your address bar? Click on that icon to add this blog to your RSS reader or bookmarks toolbar.
We’ll talk about setting up your RSS reader in my next post.
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