Does your business need a blog?

Hi, and welcome to the Upright Communications Online Marketing Blog! There are 75,000 new blogs created every day (including this one today), and many millions more already up and running. Should you join the crowd and have a blog for your business? The short answer is yes! At least you should seriously consider it as we have.

Why? A blog can help establish credibility for your business and provide the opportunity for you to show off your expertise. While your web site can demonstrate your product/service knowledge, a blog allows you to communicate directly with your customers and prospects without being limited to the strict boundaries of your web site navigation. Your blog can be a diary of your current thinking on a wide range of topics that relate to your business and your markets. It can help to establish your business as a “subject matter expert“.

And search engines love blogs too because the information is current. Just like your web site, your blog can be optimized to attract search spiders and provide another source of driving visitors to your site. Here’s an article that you might find of interest on SEO for Blogs.

To get started, you’ll need blogging software. We suggest investigating whether your current hosting account has blog software included. If not, consider using a hosted service like Typepad ($8.95/month) or Google’s Blogger (free but has less flexibility to customize). Both of these options make it easy to create and maintain your blog.

There are also consulting services to help get our blog set-up like The Blog Squad. They have a number of free resources listed on their site and several e-books, which I found to be very helpful. Another “how-to” blog book that has received good reviews is Blog Wild which we’re reading now.

If you’d like to see if other companies in your industry have a blog, go to Google’s BlogSearch, type in a keyword phrase related to your business and see if your competitor’s are in the blogosphere.

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