Blogging Should be a Part of Your Business Strategy

How a Blog Could Help Your Business & Employee's Development

Blogging has grown from what many would consider a hobby to a legitimate source of valuable content. What’s more, a blog can be beneficial to your business and employee’s development.

Blogs are a good source of information

Blogs have been one of my main sources of news and knowledge for a few years. I’ve seen the value first hand. Instead of watching the news, listening to the radio or reading the paper in the morning, I get up to the minute news from my RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader.

Although writing blogs started out as a hobby for many I consider many blogs at par or above traditional media for many topics. Bloggers are usually engaged in topics at a higher level than traditional media can be. Their posts are timely, accurate and opinionated. Today blogs have gone from side projects and hobbies to legitimate business tools.

What is a Blog?

Technically a blog is just a web page with a few differences.

Personality and opinion
Blog posts are filled with newsworthy information, much like traditional newspapers or magazines. But they adopt a different tone than traditional media. The author has the opportunity to inject personality and opinion without having to worry about presenting just the facts in an unbiased manner.

Content comes to you
With Blogs, the content can arrive via free RSS subscription. With an RSS reader, there’s no need to visit the website each day. The reader can be a web site like Google Reader or a program on your computer, mobile phone or tablet.

More frequency
Blogs are usually updated on regular basis: daily, weekly or monthly. Since the content is often less formal, it can be easier to write than other website content that only talks directly about a company’s products or services.

Engagement
Blogs allow people to gather and have deeper conversations. Readers could agree or disagree, add information that isn’t covered, and share their experience. There’s opportunity for both the author and readers to learn from this conversation. Sometimes the comments on a touchy topic can be more interesting to read than the blog post is.

Why Blog?

For Blogging to be done on behalf of your company there has to be benefits for your business and your employees. Here are a few of them:

Subject matter expertise
As a company, we share what we know to prove our expertise. This helps us build credibility, which hopefully leads to connecting with great new clients that see that there’s a lot of knowledge required to create design that works for business.

From a professional development perspective writing allows us to explore our thoughts in greater depth. With greater depth, comes expanded knowledge on diverse topics. As these thoughts are recorded they become a concrete resource, committed to memory, making it easier for individuals to talk about a subject with confidence.

Build your knowledge base
A blog post can also be drawn on as a resource. Some topics can be difficult and time consuming to explain verbally, or too lengthy to include in a proposal. You might give a high-level overview of a complex topic during a meeting or presentation and refer attendees to a blog post for the nitty-gritty details.

Of course this expertise isn't just beneficial to people outside the company. Posts can also be useful for co-workers to gain knowledge of another’s specialization. That knowledge may help them learn something new and can inspire ideas for their own work.

Make connections with like-minded people
No matter how niche your business it's likely there are others out there who want to engage in conversation about your topic. By sharing and engaging there’s opportunity to learn from each other and make great connections.

Communication is key
Being a good communicator in any profession is important. This is especially true in the world of design. By writing frequently employees become better communicators, this carries into other areas of work from writing proposals and giving presentations, creating documentation, to engaging on social media and correspondence with clients and co-workers.

Good content gets shared
A good web designer knows that content is king. Having great content on your site gives reason for people to come back often, and search engines to link to you. The more content you have with keywords that people type in, the more chance people will land on your site. All this seems obvious, but companies don't make the time to update their website.

With search engines in mind
You may have a page on your site about a particular service, but you can't type every keyword into that page without a) looking spammy and b) making the content less accessible for the user. Search enginge optimized content can be a bad reading experience for the user. Having a number of blog posts or articles written related to the services your company offers is a legit way of providing value to the reader while getting in a variety of keywords that will help rankings.

Would your company benefit from blogging?

If you're a service provider like we are the benefits are pretty clear:

• Build and convey expertise
• Increase communication with customers and employees
• Build a reference library
• Build searchable linkable content and bring more visitors to your website
• Educate co-workers with knowledge related to their work

If your company sells a product:

• Announce new products and features
• Provide a means for customers to engage with your company
• Provide customer support to the most common problems
• Give customers a reason to come back by providing interesting related content
• Increase communication with customers and employees
   

A blog can provide a lot of value for business and employees but may not be right for everyone. Would a blog provide value for your company? If you have a blog already what benefits are you seeing?