Using Blogging to Grow Your Business © Chris Bloor

A blog gives a personal face to your business. It is also a good way to serve both your current customers and potential customers that are still sitting on the fence, wondering if they should buy.

A website is static. Even if it has wonderful information and great graphics it is still static and remains the same day in and day.  A blog is frequently updated and that newness is appealing to customers interested in your product. If there is a blog link on your home page many visitors will click on it. It gives them a behind-the-scenes glimpse of your company.

The average buyer has to be exposed to a product at least seven times before making a purchase.

A blog gives prospects the opportunity to return to your website again and again and determine whether or not he wants to purchase from your company. It's a good way to establish trust and credibility.

Search engines love blog posts. Blog posts are indexed quickly and keep your website fresh, which boosts its ranking in the search engine. If someone is typing in a search phrase for your product; you want your website to be among the top in the search results. A blog can help accomplish this.

Therefore, it's good to occasionally target certain keyword phrases when writing blog posts. You don't want to do this all the time; ultimately you are writing for people, not search engines. But it's good to have a list of the common keyword phrases that people use to try and find your product.

To find these phrases go to a site like www.wordtracker.com and type in phrases that are relevant to your business. You'll find out how many people are searching those phrases each day and you can incorporate that phrase into a blog post title.

If you have employees, a blog can even be a way to stay in touch with employees. In a large company, most employees don't have the opportunity to communicate regularly with the President, for instance.

Regular blog posts by leaders in the company can help the employees feel they are more involved with the company and motivate them to be more productive, which in turn grows your business. Perhaps your company could have more than one blog or have a blog where several employees can be invited to contribute to it.

If you decide to have a blog be sure to activate a RSS feed for it. A RSS feed makes it easier for people to read your blog regularly without having to manually visit your site. More and more people are using feed readers such as Google Reader to read their favorite blogs so a RSS feed is essential. Plus it's free and easy to set up so there's no excuse not to have one.

You should also invite readers to leave comments so that your blog is interactive. This gives you another way to find out what your customers and prospects are thinking. Two way ideas like this will also give you ideas for future blog posts or other ideas you might use to grow your business. Who knows, maybe even a new product idea.