There has been a lot of talk on the mompreneurs message boards about business blogging. So, since I am “Blogging Mom”, and I’ve been blogging for my business and about my business (two separate blogs) for over two years now, I figured I should go ahead and start touching on the subject of blogging in the mompreneurs? blog. I’m hoping to tackle business blogs one subject at a time, but I know I get wordy at times too.

The main questions that all pre-blogging business owners have are: “Is a blog necessary for my business?”; “Why do I need a blog?” and “What am I supposed to write about?”.

Today I’ll touch on why there is no question – you must blog!!

A blog is necessary for your business for a number of reasons, but the top two are the transparency (customer relations) aspect of blogs and the search engine optimization advantages.

Transparency:

• Customers and clients want to know your story! Blogs should be conversational in tone and should accept comments. Your customers will feel that there is a real person behind the business and that they will be able to get the information they need if they do need to contact you.
• The blog can touch on product updates, awards your business has received, and press and publicity, but it should also have a personal aspect to it and should share information that your target audience is interested in (and are therefore likely to “google”). For example, we have a baby accessory and apparel line, so I’ll blog about tracking your pregnancy, or the top baby names of the year. We get searches from pregnant women, exposing our brand to them early on – and early exposure is key!

Search Engine Optimization

• Blogs are a dream for your site’s search engine optimization. SEO basically means how well your site is set up for the search engines – do you cover your title bar with keywords, use keywords in your URLS; does your content match the headings; are you using alt text for images; etc. The right blogging software sets up all of these crucial SEO factors for you automatically
• Content is king – blogs are easy to use and enable you to create a lot of content on your site with little pain involved. The more content you have on your site, the more the search engines are going to like your site. Blogs make it easy to use keywords, add images, and create links.
• The more useful information, and outbound links you have, the more inbound links you’ll gain. As you grow your content, more people will find you in natural searches and will start to link to those pages on your site that they found useful. In addition, outbound links will notify similar sites (those you are linking out to) of your existence. If those site owners see the similarity, many will link to your site.
• Blogs keep the spiders and bots coming back – the more often you update your site, the more often spiders will visit. With easy-to-use blogging software, you can update your site often.

Speaking of blogging – I owe content to another site I’ll be a new blogger on (that was a mouthful), so I’ll talk about “what to write about as a business blogger” next time.

Leave comments if you have questions so I know what they are and can try to answer them!! I’ve had my head in this stuff for years now!