Thriving Thursday ~ today your focus should be in the “groove”. Your week is almost behind you and your Tickler File task tracking sheets should have several “cross offs”! Keep up the great work, remember the goals for Finish It Friday and get as much done today as possible. Productivity should be at a peak today….how are you doing?
Strengthen Your Presence, There are Benefits to a Blog
Yesterday, Work It Wednesday we discussed some of the objections to having or doing a blog today let’s focus on the benefits to a blog! Blogs benefit ANY and ALL businesses for different reasons but there is one they have in common…Visibility/Presence! If you are conducting business and you do not have a blog (and you are not paying tons of $$ for SEO on your static site) chances are your site ranks very low on the search engines and your company/business is lost. This is a very powerful reason alone to have a blog!
Blog Adds Visibility
7 Key benefits to have your blog:
- Visibility/Presence: as mentioned above this is the top reason for sure! If you are in business and your visibility or presence is low, how do you continue to drive traffic to your business? How do you create a following with less effort as you grow? A blog will give you web presence and the ability to share and touch hundreds of thousands more people then you ever could with a static website.
- Inexpensive: Blogs for the most part are very inexpensive to start and maintain – you can have one created for you for free along with your first set of content added for you, awesome! They also have a support office to help in the future. (no matter what secure your domain name, click here for a special of $7.49 for the year ~ discount is taken at the check out stage automatically)
- Reputation: Your blog assists in building and maintaining a reputation. You have the opportunity for people to get to know YOU and more about your business. You can be consistent in presentation which will build your reputation and a WHY for people… like “why they should know and do business with YOU”
- Builds Your List: VERY IMPORTANT, your blog and the attention it attracts builds your marketing list with an RSS feed and a Newsletter sign up – (you can read more on newsletters on our previous post). An RSS feed is set up through a feed provider like “FeedBurner” and it is indicated on your site with the orange square – RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. This is a great service you can provide on your blog which allows people to click on it and register to have your blog posts delivered to them in their “blog reader” account or inbox – making it very convenient for them to keep receiving your message without having to remember to go back to your blog, point is they do not miss your message! You can also track stats in your burner account. Your Newsletter sign up gives you a way to later market, educate, connect with those who registered to receive your monthly/weekly mailings, a MUST!
- Direct Communication & Ongoing Dialogue: Blog posts give you a way to continue to communicate with your audience. Encourage comments on your blog posts. This not only gives your direct feedback but also allows for you to engage with your readers and then you can even take lengthy conversations off the blog and into email or direct verbal contact – building relationships!
- Social Media: Blogs offer simple intergration to the different social media platforms (again another MUST to have a presence). You can link your blog activity to your personal profile or business page in Facebook & Twitter accounts and your Facebook & Twitter activity to your blog! There are ways to connect with your other social media platforms as well, just Facebook being the largest with Twitter too.
- Expert Position: Using your blog to write informative, entertaining and educational “articles” helps build you as an expert in your field Granted there might be tons of people out there that work or own the same type of business/service company as you but mixed with your reputation the information you provide will build a following of people that will WANT to do business with you.
Face it, we are all in business to make money right? True, but there are a lot of us out there that really enjoy helping people, teaching people, and sharing information while we make money. I have two companies – VA-a-GoGo, a virtual assistant company with a team – that is my main business and I love it – I also have this, Wealth And Abundance Today which was my passion, a place where I could help business owners with some of the areas where I have found to be the most stumbling blocks: time management, productivity, tools and getting past thinking it is all too hard.
Your blog will help set you out from the crowd, using your message to build your reputation, to create a following, to increase your marketing list and on top of that give you the ability to connect with people in places you may have never been able to without one.
A blog is a buisness tool you cannot affort NOT to have….
If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment – others will benefit with from what you have to say too!