The Benefits of Blogging (Blogging Tips through Blog)

The benefits of blogging for business, also known as corporate blogging, go far beyond the reach of search engine optimization. SEO is really only one very small part of the many benefits being discovered.

Although blogging can be anything you want it to be, businesses can use them to come down to a more personal level with their visitors. This alone is a huge benefit to the bottom line in any business. People want a peek inside the company with which they are dealing.

I am not going to try to convince you to blog. That is 100% your decision. However I will tell you that nearly 50% of the traffic on my business websites comes directly from my blogs. These are folks that were not necessarily looking for my business who decided, as a result of reading my blog, to visit my site.

Blogging can be an excellent way to Increase Website Traffic. Many of my clients mention that they initially found me through a blog article, my own or someone else’s.

You want to plan a blog that caters to the specific target audience on which your business focuses.

My personal stories relate to my business more than most people realize. They portray who I am. Often your blog takes care of the “trust building” aspect of things long before people arrive at my site. Also, vice versa, people who visit my blog from my website will also develop trust.

However, my articles and blogs are focused on my specific target audience, which may or may not be yours. I deal with small business owners that prefer a more personal approach than they find in some other businesses that do what I do. This is my personal niche in the business world - people who want to deal with a “real live down to earth human” that talks in everyday language they appreciate and understand.

If you have spent some time reading my primary blog, you will find many “voices” based on the specific topic I am discussing. I have considered dividing the primary blog to remove the personal articles to a private blog, but have had way too many clients tell me it was the deciding factor to do business with me.

I find a nearly equal number of visitors that come from both personal articles and professional articles, but they are often a different audience than my website would have attracted.

You may notice that I also keep my blog design similar to my site, so it does not feel like they have landed in a whole new world. In your business you could take things a hundred different directions, depending entirely on what visitors you are hoping to attract.

Blogging in NOT new and it is not a phase.

Blogging is done by major companies. It is something I truly feel every small business owner should take a serious look at.

* Blog Business Summit

This list is far more extensive, but I will let you do the research on your own. This will just get you started.

* Google Blog
* Yahoo Blog
* CNET’S 28 Blogs
* Microsoft Community Blogs

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See Announcement concerning IBM

“Early next week IBM will introduce the largest ever corporate blogging initiative in a bid to encourage any of its 130,000 staff to become online evangelists for the company.”

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A Case for Corporate Blogs

“51% of the blog readers visit product and/or corporate sites as a result of reading blogs.”

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Research the benefits of Blogging for Business. I think you will find some strong reasons to begin using this powerful method of building credibility in your business.

* Corporate Blogging Survey Results Released

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WebProNews Valuable Blog Survey Results

Of the blog readers, 54% form their opinions about products or companies on the basis of blogs.

51% of the blog readers visit product or corporate sites as a results of reading blogs.

58% of the blog readers, read them to find news and information they can’t find otherwise.

57% of them are interested in the personal opinions of the authors, but only 43% are interested in the discussions.

“If these results are correct, it’s one of the strongest cases for corporate blogs I’ve seen. What an opportunity to have 57% percent of your readers actually interested in your personal opinion, just to mention one detail.”

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From an SEO point of view, when done properly, blogs can vastly increase the incoming anchor text links to your primary website. If you want to do well in the search engine results, you must begin to Improve Link Popularity .

Successful online businesses focus on a variety of Website Linking Strategies. Blogging can help accomplish this.