The term was coined in 1999, and today Webster’s dictionary describes a blog as a “diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts recorded on a Web page. And importantly, it says that blogs are “typically updated every day” and that “blogs often reveal the personality of the author. But think seriously about regular blogging. According to Trend – an internet search engine focused on the world of blogs – only 11% of all blogs update weekly or more.
What is a blog?
What values more and more is what you write and not how often you write – quality not quantity or frequency. For a business, there are several potential reasons to blog, but, (there is always a but, isn’t there?) what you need to consider before blogging, is: Why are you doing it? It a forum to have a more personal connection between you and your customers? To create a way where media regularly review what you have to say, instead of media just being passive recipients of press releases. It’s private, a workspace where project members keep each other updated without losing time?
They build your company as a thought leader so that people in your business will pay attention? Is it to test ideas or products, a place where people can discuss, and provide you with a measure of value or interest. It a bit more ‘cynical’ extra attempt to rank higher in search engines because they reward sites that update often. That link to other sites, and have many inbound links. You do not need any real professional expertise to write a blog.
” Northeastern University’s Professor Walter Carl, the scholars in his Advanced Organizational Communications class (May 2006), John Cass, and his associates at Backbone Media, Inc. carried out the “Blogging Success Study”.
The research team surveyed twenty corporate bloggers of companies of varied sizes and industries. Asked each blogger a series of standardized questions. Only bloggers who had been blogging for one year and considered their blogging works successful were eligible to participate.
They identified five factors for success.
1. Culture:
If a company has special cultural traits worth sharing or a bad reputation it wants to repudiate, blogging can be a winning option.
2. Transparency:
Transparency is critical to establishing honesty and trust with an audience. People want to view an honest portrayal of a company.
3. Time:
It takes a lot of time to set up, study, and write a quality blog. Businesses need to identify a person who has the time to blog.
4. Dialogue:
A company’s ability and eagerness to engage in a dialogue with their customer base about topics that the customer base is interested in is important to its blogging success.
5. Interesting writing style and personalization:
A blogger’s writing style and how much they are willing to share their life, experience, and opinions brings human interest to a blog. Help build a special connection with readers and will keep people reading. Nevertheless, they missed out on the most important.
It takes time and commitment to building a good business blog. You must hold with it and expect it to take months to build up a sizable audience. Lots of people blog for some months and stop. You need to blog regularly and at a constant pace. You need to find time to write posts, reply to comments from readers, monitor other blogs, keep up with the latest industry news. Build relationships with other bloggers. However, sticky with it is the only hard and fast rule to building a successful business focus blog.
