Business Blogging offers tremendous advantage for small companies.
Business Blogging offers tremendous advantage for small companies. While blogging enables large publicly-held corporations to look and act more like smaller, more personal counterparts, blogging gives smaller companies the look and feel of a larger more established firm.
Blogging can help a small company establish a market presence hitherto reserved for the big guys, establish its credibility and expertise. More importantly, blogging can help drive search engine rankings which can enable a small company to be more readily found.
Business blogging builds networks and helps to establish relationships with customers, partners, investors, analysts, press and anyone else who is interested in what your company has to offer.
Business blogging is very cost effective to implement.
Important for a small firm, blogging requires very little money, though a rather healthy bit of writing and time. Many blog hosting services are free of charge or cost only a few dollars a month for extra services, such as analytics or more flexibility with blog site design.
Business blogging offers tremendous benefits for the small company.
I'd like to share my own experience which I think typifies some of these benefits.
About a year ago thanks to the economy, I found myself with time to do something I had always wanted, to take a harder look at the Internet and other new digital technologies and how these had impacted high tech marketing and PR.
Business blogging provides a window on a very different world and a new way of communicating.
I was intrigued by blogs but had no idea what they were, much less how to use one. Nor am I a particularly technical person, and I thought blogs for for geeks.
However, the more I learned, the more I became interested in blogging and the new possibilities for communicating it represents. And because it is the type of thing you must learn experientially, I decided to try it out for myself. As I gained more confidence with the format, I
began to write comments on other blog sites and post responses on my site to blog posts other had written. Every once and a while I took time to write longer pieces to explore some of the changes I was witnessing.
Business blogging improve search engine ratings and will drive others to your site.
Having paid scant attention to our website
statistics, I was amazed to discover that those for my blog were steadily growing. Week-by-week, month-by-month, readers were
beginning to trickle in -- from all over the world. In a single day their might be hits from Turkey, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, the UK and
all over the US.
Business blogging can enable small companies to establish strong relationships to their channel, to potential partners and customers.
Then a few of my posts got picked up in the blogosphere as I commented on other blogs, and began to participate in industry discussions and write articles on the impact of the Internet and new digital media. To my surprise my site was listed on several marketing and PR websites and blogs and as a resource in Silicon Valley for start ups coming in from Germany and Sweden. A few posts were even picked up by several universities in Pennsylvania, Alabama and the UK and used for background reading on new ways of communicating.
Business blogging can provide the kind of visibility and credibility only larger companies have had, to become an authority in your industry, to be recognized, searched for -- and found.
Before I knew it, we were getting queries and calls from all over the world from potential clients, partners and others.
Business blogging can make a small relatively unknown company, a real player in the global marketplace, bring them access and attention unimagined before.
Later, I participated in a week long blogging discussion on New Models of Communications, lead by Elizabeth Albrycht, a highly regarded communicator based in Paris. The others, who lead days were also well-known and highly regarded bloggers, based in Amsterdam, London, Washington DC. and myself, a newcomer, in Silicon Valley. While those of us who lead days, never physically met, we were in contact, read each other's posts and corresponded. The result is that long after the event, I now feel connected with a new group of like-minded professionals I might not have otherwise met.
Business blogging creates community and rich network of contacts for both small companies and individuals.
So the story goes.
What's all the fuss about?
Business blogging in itself may not be
"the revolution", but it exemplifies one that is quietly underway. I have become an unabashed business blogging enthusiast, passionate
about the application as much as what it represents -- an entirely new
way of communicating with great benefits to the small company or start up.
Robin, wanted to thank you for your presentation a few months back at the SD Forum Marketing SIG! You inspired me to create a blog for our branding & design firm.
It's been remarkably effective in turning prospect inquiries into much warmer leads. I've gotten lots of good feedback from prospects and clients on it already.
Though, it does take a bit of getting used to when people start talking to me about subjects I've written about on either the b-blog or personal blog during first meetings. Overall, absolutely worth the effort!
Thank you!!
Posted by: Harris | July 06, 2005 at 02:28 PM