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How to Market Your Small Business Online
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Article 5: Embrace The Power of Blogs
Blogs aren’t just for high school students wanting to share their latest dramas.
“A blog is a legitimate business marketing tool and it can be free and it’s very easy to use and it’s actually kind of fun,” says Bruce C. Brown, a Web developer in Land O’ Lakes, Fla., and author of “How to Use the Internet to Advertise, Promote and Market Your Business or Web Site With Little or No Money” (Atlantic Publishing Company, 2006).
Blogger (www.blogger.com) and WordPress (www.wordpress.com) are among the free programs available.
Find ways to express your company’s personality, perhaps through your writing style and choice of entries. Mixing in press releases is OK, too.
“It’s kind of a different twist on pushing out your company information to your customers,” says Brown.
Other advantages of blogs:
- Blogs can help establish your company’s credibility.
- Regularly updated blogs can help boost your Web site’s search-engine rankings.
- Blogs allow visitors to interact with customers, who can ask questions and offer comments. A downside would be if negative remarks pop up, of course.
Boston real estate broker John Keith says he gets all his business through his blog at www.bostonreb.com.
“It’s giving you a way to start a relationship with somebody in a non-confrontational way,” says Keith, whose clients tend to be first-time homebuyers, empty nesters and those relocating to the area. “It’s a legitimate way of generating business, which is the hardest part of being in real estate for most people – finding buyers and sellers. The best way to do it is be there where people are looking, and where people are looking is on the Internet.”
The costs related to his blog are included in his monthly $37 fees for Web hosting, but there’s also the time factor. Keith posts three to four times a day and spends about 90 minutes writing entries and five hours doing research.
Keith is quite an active blogger, but you don’t have to be. Just be sure you keep your entries relevant and update regularly enough that people keep visiting.
“You can literally spend 15 minutes a day and have a very good success rate,” Brown says.
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