There are as many approaches to blogging as there are people out there. This article is about thinking through your strategy for business blogging before you leap in. The question is what are you trying to achieve? Are you blogging to raise your industry profile, sell something, or generate leads? Here are some of the different approaches to business blogging:

Blogging as your business
This article is all about business blogging, so what I mean by blogging as your business is the use of blogging as a standalone business - where the blog IS your business.
One of the main strategies employed by bloggers is to leverage the community aspect of blogging and to try and build a readership for your blog, much in the same way as publishing a magazine. This is a tried and tested method and works well particularly if you can write diverse and provocative articles which will 1. act as link bait and 2. encourage your readership to comment. The net result of this is that your articles will be referenced by other (even if just as examples of opinions the linker is ridiculing) thus building up your inbound links. It also means that your blog will have user generated content i.e. your readership are doing some of the work of creating valuable content on your domain by writing comments (and rants!). If you go down this route the problem is that you need to 1. be opinionated 2. be able to write well and 3. you will need a strategy for commercialising your traffic (or else it’s simply a vanity exercise that you will be funding in terms of hours spent blogging and bandwidth burned up). RyderDiary.com is a simple example of a blog which is a stand alone business. The concept behind RyderDiary.com is to build a niche magazine type blog which focuses on the Ryder Cup event and appeals to golf fans.

Blogging as a channel for business
If the aim of your blogging is to help increase the sales of an existing business, it’s likely that you are probably using a blog platform to create an effective content management system for content that is relevant to your industry. KitchenForce.com is a good example of such a strategy. The concept is that a business with a product to sell, targets blogging about niche product for a specific market. In the case of KitchenForce the product is Kitchen Countertops and the strategy is to create valuable content that is pertinent to the consumer who’s searching for the product. In this case you are not targetting an audience of kitchen design fans but rather one off visitors, who find your content when it’s relevant and then potentially convert to sales. The difficulties with this type of blogging is that you need to know what you’re talking about! The content has to be credible and informative to have any value.

Blogging your brand
Here at Aonach our chatter section is a blog where we share some of our ideas and generally shoot the breeze on subjects that are vaguely related to our brand. The idea with a blog like this is to simply act as soft brand collateral. It allows our clients and prospective clients a way of understanding more about what we think and who we are and also alows the public to interact with us.

Naturally many blogs have a bit of all three strategies in the mix but it’s important to decide up-front what you focus is and what your aim is. Otherwise you may end up just another voice crying in the blog-wilderness!

If you are interested in business blogging and would like to explore the possibilities for your business, contact us and we can help you formulate an appropriate strategy for your company.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 4:15 am and is filed under Blogging. 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.