Create a Blog for your Business?

Should you create a blog for your business?

There are different Pros and Cons. Personally I like the idea of creating a blog for a business. However, at the business level, there might be some concerns for different businesses.

You have a website, why do you need a blog?

For me, website is a place for you to provide one way information to your visitors. Whereas in a blog, people can interact with your posting and visitors can discuss among themselves or with you, all topics are archive in chronological order/ category. Anyone who is interested in a certain topic can read all related postings. The communication is both ways, visitor tells you what they think and you explain to them and others who read the postings. The best thing is, customer get to communicate with insider of the company. In some case can be CEO, Marketing Manager, Sales Manager or Service Manager etc. In some case it can be the master blogger. Anyhow, it is still another channel for the management to know about what is going on in the field.

Moreover, you can create reciprocal linkages between your website and your blog. The rich and extra content in your blog will get itself a high page rank. This in turns will bring more traffic to your website. The reciprocal linkages in both sites (your website and your blog) might help themselves to improve their Search engine page rank.

What if your customer asks you some question you don’t know how to answer?

This is many businesses’ concern and that’s why many of them are reluctant to have a blog. If a business chooses not to answer, it will seem to be irresponsive and won’t get the company any good images. If a business chooses to answer, which it should, it needs to answer very skillfully, need to satisfy the customer and still not disclosing anything it doesn’t want to tell or get away with something it doesn’t know how to answer. Moreover, the customer will respond back in your blog. I think the business needs to have a very good Public Relation (PR) team to do that.

Uncontrolled postings…

This is another concern of many businesses. Some bloggers just keep on posting, maybe even on some irrelevant topics. Anyhow, this one is easy, the blog administrator can just delete the irrelevant posts. Some bloggers just keep on confronting the business. It can be a tougher situation. You cannot just delete or block a blogger. If you do that, and some mad blogger might bad mouth your company. Your PR team should get you a good tactic based on the situation.

I guess based on the priority of your company, you can decide whether you should get your company a blog. If your first priority is to get a channel for the management to have interaction with the customers, and confrontation is not a concern (you know how to handle it), a blog might be good for your company. When you do have your blog, make sure your master bloggers are responsive to the postings there. Otherwise you have defeated your purpose of having a blog and this will also gain your company a bad image.

Buying Multiple Domains to Improve Site Traffic?

Many people might ask, will buying more domain names improve your site traffic? Should we use buying domain names as one of the internet marketing strategy to increase web traffic? It really depends. However, frankly, in most cases it doesn’t.

It will help a bit if you use the domain with keywords as your main address but not as a forward. For example, you own an online store with the site address “junepharmacy.com”, and you buy the domain name “onlinedrugstore.com” and have it forward to junepharmacy.com. The new purchased domain will not help generating traffic for junepharmacy.com unless there is a famous drug store called “onlinedrugstore.com” and its customer mistyped it as “onlinedrugstore.ca” (Some people does purchase typos of popular sites and in many cases this does help to increase their site traffic).

However, if you use the domain “onlinedrugstore.ca” as your main site address, it might help generating more traffic to your website. It helps as there are keywords in the domain name. When people types in “Online drug store” in Google, Yahoo, MSN or other search engines, your site will be very relevant and will show up in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) enjoying a good page rank.

So you might only need to buy one premium domain for internet marketing purpose. Select your domain very carefully and don’t waste your money buying multiple domains if not necessary. If you need to use your company name as the domain, name all your other pages with keywords, this will surely help (e.g. www.junepharmacy.com/onlinedrugstore.html).