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August 30, 2006

Sales and Marketing

Five Reasons Why You Should Blog for Your Business

Posted by Janine Popick at 4:47 PM

My company VerticalResponse is in the business of enabling small businesses to create and deliver email newsletters, quickly and affordably. Bottom line? We are an email marketing company. So people I know were shocked when I went to the Business Blogging Summit last year in San Francisco, and boy did I get religion. In my mind, blogging was for people to basically publish a personal diary, not for business.

Wow was I wrong. Business blogging is exploding. After this conference I set out to do a test. Without disrupting anyone in the company, my "pet project" was to launch a blog and make it successful. I talked to a few friends who have been blogging for years. They've been crazy about it as am I now. I got some great pointers.

I set up my Typepad account and off I went. It's about $12/month and no engineering needed. Perfect.

What did I learn? A lot. Here are some reasons why I've found that blogging for business not only works, but is necessary.

1. The Voice of the Business - Do you really know what the leader of the company you do business with is thinking? What they go through? What is important to them? What type of person they are? Do you usually have the ability to tap into their expertise? What's going on in the company? More often than not you never get this type of insight. And hey, some CEO's don't want to put themselves out there for people to publicly chat with. I get it – It's a lot of work. But if you want your voice to be that of the company, there's no better way than a blog.

2. Comment Consolidation - What a time-saver. If one of your readers has a question, chances are others have it too. What better way to answer it than in one place where everyone can see and hopefully benefit.

3. Customer Interaction - Not only do I love to interact with our own users but when they comment and others start to comment on the comment, it's the best thing for everyone. This is exactly what any blogger would want. I don't have all the answers, so I try to encourage customer experts to comment and pitch in on ideas. What might work great in one industry, might actually do well in others.

4. Traffic Driver - We get about 160+ visitors to the blog a day. When when we combine it with our email marketing newsletter we get thousands. It also drives traffic from the search engines as another source, and gets picked up by other blogs that find the posts interesting.

5. RSS Feeds - Some people like to get their information with RSS feeds. It's easy with a blog, they'll sign up for your feed and get it realtime right in their reader.

That's the experience we've had here with blogs and it's only getting better. It's just one of the many ways we communicate to our customers and thanks to those loyal customers, we've made it to the 2006 Inc. 500 List.

Got any reasons why businesses should blog? Love to hear them!

Janine Popick is CEO of VerticalResponse, an Inc. 500 company.

7 Comments

Posted by: richard chanter at August 31, 2006 6:50 AM

We use our business blog to profile members of staff which shows potential Clients the interest we have in our personnel. At the same time, members of staff can go on the net and see their own profile and print it out if they wish. We also publish some results on our blog - an indication to potential Clients of our performance. Finally, with their consent, we profile Clients who stay at our Lodge, thus giving other potential clients an idea of the type of Guests we have and their interests.

Posted by: Andrew MacGill at August 31, 2006 7:21 PM

Hi Janine,

First off, we use Vertical Response through salesforce.com's AppExchange and it's a great service.

Second, another great reason to utilize a business blog is that it gives CEOs an opportunity to get feedback on their ideas and plans. It always seems as an entrepreneur that we've got 10 different ideas on how to grow our businesses but capital for one. A blog lets others help you pick which ideas are going to be the winners.

My two cents.

Best,

Andrew MacGill

Posted by: gene x at September 1, 2006 1:38 AM

This is a spot on article. We started our company blog b/c it made a lot of sense (after all, we started as a photoblog, but have since evolved).

We found that traffic grew and people found out about us from our blog as well as found great contacts for our philanthropic work that we may not have found through the one-way dialog that a website offers. The interactivity of the blog is a nice channel for feedback and ideas.

Posted by: Snoozester at September 1, 2006 6:39 AM

We also recently launched a blog for our company: http://blog.snoozester.com

Posted by: Christopher Richards at September 6, 2006 5:13 PM

You can listen to "Why blog for business?," here on Sounds Like Business at podcast.net (6 minutes 27 seconds)

http://www.podcast.net/show/16075

Posted by: Paul at December 4, 2007 8:34 PM

Hi Janine, and thank you for your excellent article. I run a blog http://www.blogsport.com.au discussing what's happening in sports both internationally and in Australia. We have found that this site is not only a fantastic means of interacting with a highly informed audience, but has amazing potential in the online advertising arena. Blogging has certainly now developed far past personal diaries and is a very powerful business tool. I recently attended a blogging conference, and to my surprise, 40% of the people attending were lawyers looking into the issue of blogging, trying to get their heads around how their company can benefit. Blogging is very serious business, and certainly can give insight into customers needs and wants which would otherwise be very difficult to identify.

Posted by: Armond scavo at December 12, 2007 5:51 PM

I have just started a blog for my business tiitled a word from armond. Are there any publications that can help me optimize my blog. how to attract people to it? how often to blog...?

armond scavo

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