By Melissa Shea

I’m sure you’ve been thinking… should I create a blog to promote my business? It’s a common question I get from clients and it’s not a simple yes or no answer. Before you invest the time and a little money to set one up, you need to ask yourself a few questions.

1. Am I willing to make a commitment to update my blog at least once a week?
2. Do I have a plan to easily acquire and create content for my blog?
3. What is my strategy to convert my blog readers into customers?

These are essential questions you need to answer to ensure that your blog will be a success. Think through these questions carefully so that you can be prepared for the commitment and enjoy the boost to your business a blog will bring.

So what exactly is blogging? Blog is the widely used term that refers to web log, essentially an online journal.

Blogging for your brick-n-morter or online business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services.
Here are a few ways to boost your business with a blog:

1. Keep your customers and web site visitors updated on new additions to your services or your web site. A blog will give you an opportunity to make the case for your services, promote products – and even promote affiliate products.
2. Promote yourself as an expert and offer advice or reviews on specific services or products that are related to your business. Your blog entries will be indexed by the search engines and your information will be appreciated by potential customers researching a service.
3. Include links to other web sites and ask for incoming links as well to drive traffic and subsequently improve your ranking on search engines.
4. Encourage comments from your readers and customers. You can learn and improve your products and services through feedback from your readers.
5. Connect with other bloggers. When other bloggers notice that you are providing valuable content in your blog, they will link to your blog and create another incoming link for your web site.

So, if you’re ready to start blogging – there are a few methods of setting one up. First of all, don’t use one of the free blog services from companies like Google or Wordpress.com. Instead install the blog system from Wordpress.org directly into your web site – you may need the help of a programmer (I know a good one if you need help…) or you should check to see if your current hosting company provides blog software as a part of their hosting package. This system would be easy for you to set yourself, or have the hosting company walk you through.

Blogging can be a lot of fun once you get started and it will build content on your web site, drive traffic to your web site and improve your web site rankings… so what are you waiting for???

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at and is filed under Blogging, Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.