Starting Your Own Business Blog
Creative Blog Designs to Build Traffic, Improve Customer Awareness, Engage Your Viewers
What is a blog?
“A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.”
- Wikipedia
In recent years, blogging has become a powerful online marketing tool for businesses, as well as a great informal platform for business owners to speak more personally and casually to their customers and clients, share news and promote new products and services.
How can you use blogging in your business?
Many people still don’t associate blogs with business, but it can be a great asset. It gives you an informal platform to:
- provide news, announcements and useful information to your customers
- share opinions and engage customers to provide feedback
- enhance internal or customer communication
- allow your customers/viewers to comment or share their opinion
- market or promote a new product or service
These are just a few examples. Blogging is commonly used by businesses, policitians, clubs and organisations as a powerful communication and marketing tool.
How do I start a blog?
There are 2 ways you can create a blog:
1 Add a blog to your website, or start a dedicated blogging site.
This is our recommended option. Having your blog integrated into your website has a powerful effect on your potential search engine rankings.
We use WordPress to build our blogs. Providing you have the right settings activated, it will automatically feed your latest posts through to google, so instead of waiting 1, 2 even 3 weeks for google to index a new page on your website, with a blog your latest post can be indexed in Google in a matter of hours.
This can be a great channel to get people to your website, and once there it is natural to browse to other sections of your site, especially if you include links to your key pages as part of your blog post.
We can also synchronise your blog posts to automatically post to your Facebook Page and Twitter Profile.
A WordPress blog can be added to your existing website, or we can create a new WordPress Website for you and include a section for your blog.
- Read more about WordPress, or Business Blogging using WordPress
2 Use an external blogging service
There are many free services to start your own blog that operate externally to your website. The main options are WordPress.com and Blogspot. If you decide to go with this option you should include a link on your website to your blog.
We offer blog customisation services for both WordPress.com and Blogspot customers, where we can customise your blog to match the look and style of your website.
