A blog is nothing more than a communication channel. Companies use it to interact with their interest groups(customers, suppliers, investors, etc.)and the professionals(scientists, politicians, artists, athletes, etc.)They use it to stay in touch with their followers or people with whom they share interests. In general we can say thatThe blog provides a direct communication channel between people, offering the opportunity to acquire recognition and authority. Let’s dig a little deeper into the reasons why the company needs a blog.
What a blog can offerto a professional, individual or companyWe can summarize it in the following:
- Creating and maintaining a blog is easy. It is not necessary to be a computer scientist or have particular technical knowledge.Writing a blog can be as easy as writing an email.You simply access the blog, select the option to create a new post and type the text. If necessary, images are attached and published. That’s all.
- Responsibilities can be delegated. Maintaining a blog can be a team effort.The person who creates it can add users and assign them different responsibilities. For example, you can have a set of authors or people to monitor comments.
- Your content can be syndicated. With this procedure, loyal users do not have to go to the blog periodically to checkthe existence of new articles, but theseThey automatically arrive at their terminals.
- Allows you to establish relationships. Blogs offer the option oflet readers write their own commentsto each publication. This opens the door to a new form of direct communication and allows the perceptions of interest groups to be better calibrated. Obviously, these communications can be moderated to avoid other uses.
- Allow recommendations. Blogs include web 2.0 capabilities that allow you to build a community. One of these interesting features isthe possibility of recommending the articles to friends and contacts through social networks. This makes viral spread possible.
- They bring visits to the website.The articlesthat are published on the blogmay contain references to web content, so it becomes a means to attract visitors to it. In fact, it can be used in a complementary way with other means of social communication, thus taking advantage of possible synergies.
- Improvement in search engines .While getting a place among the results of web pages is not an easy task,search engines highlight blog results more easily. Frequent updating of blogs improves the positioning of your content in search results. On the other hand, blog posts can be optimized for search engines by adding specific keywords.
- Audio and video. Although the most popular blogs are those that include text content,There are also blogs with audio ( podcast ) or video ( Vlog ) content.. These contents can open up new possibilities, such as targeting users with mobile phones (who prefer to listen or watch than read) or making multimedia presentations of any topic, product or service.
As you can see, the blog is a 2.0 tool that many consider has the potential to become the center of professional and business relationships. Besides,Blogs can be integrated into the corporate website itself, as another section of the same, allowing you to directly bring all its benefits to the website..
Blog and marketing
A prestigious manager who decided to write his own blog in 2004 (Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra) said thatWe are what we publish , that by writing his blog he was putting a face to his company. The blog allowed him to highlight interesting aspects of his company that he could not communicate through other more formal means. He even went so far as to highlight the importance of a manager’s blog as a means of internal communication for the company.
For a professional or small business, the blog can become an important marketing and public relations tool..It is what can help you position yourself in the environment and be known and referenced as an authority in the sector..
If we think about it exclusively from a marketing point of view,There are four reasons why you should be interested in the world of blogging.:
- Investigate. Check what other people say about us, our brand, our products and services or our company. Even about our target market or competitors.
- Communicate. Participate in conversations on other blogs that discuss topics of interest to us, our market or sector. This allows us to communicate our point of view.
- To collaborate. Working with blog authors who write about the industry, our company, products and services will give us the opportunity to offer them first-hand information and open communication channels to compare information.
- Lead. Create opinion by writing our own blog.
Despite the above, don’t be fooled: writing a blog requires effort . On the other hand, integrating the blog with marketing objectives is an exercise that for many marketing and public relations professionals is not entirely obvious. In any case, if we manage to position ourselves with our blog, we will be able to talk about a before and after.
Don’t be fooled: writing a blog requires a lot of effort
The blog on the corporate website
When from a corporate point of view you have a blog completely independent of the website, managed even by different people, you run the risk of creating and maintaining two different personalities on the Internet.. A website is usually much less dynamic than a blog and those responsible for it sometimes become disinterested in updating it, quickly becoming outdated in aesthetics and content.
The truth is that current blogging systems, blogging engines, are powerful enough to be able to become complete websites. This significantly reduces the costs of training, management and maintenance of the company’s presence on the Internet. Tools like WordPress can be integrated into our server, combining the blog with the rest of the services we provide on the web.
Including a blog on a website means adding two interesting advantages:
- Improve your positioning in search engines. Search engines positively value the existence of original content on the web. On the other hand, when blog articles are disseminated through different social media, multiple references and inbound links to the blog are achieved, which also improves web positioning.
- Makes the website more social. The blog allows its readers to contribute ideas, comments and experiences, positively influencing the establishment of relationships and enhancing the perception of trust and commitment among participants. Create community.
Installing a blog on your own website is not as simple as opening a blog on a specialized server. In fact, it often requires a professional to perform the initial installation. However, once installed, the rest of the use is similar to that of any other blog. WordPress, for example, offers the software necessary to create a blog on the web ( http://wordpress.org/download ). Other alternatives are Drupal, Joomla! or Ghost, among many others.
