“
Have you ever wondered how you can write a blog for your business website that is at once informative attracts visitors to your website and improves your sales conversion rate?”  You see this type of sales technique in emails and website designers’ and PR company websites on a daily basis and I am going to give you a personal view of what I think of blogging based on personal experience gained on expending hundreds of hours running up to 14 blogs at one time in the last year or two.  Forgive me but I will concentrate on the negatives to start with as this is actually a serious marketing tool that should not be dealt with in a half-hearted matter.

Writing a blog (or short article for the Internet) is relentless work simply for the reason that normally, you are looking for good rankings on Google and nothing is permanent.  You have to keep using your limited time and energy to generate (or whip the delegated person in your company to keep writing whilst doing a full days’ real work’) a constant stream of original prose that is relevant, has the correct density of keywords that rank highly on Google Adwords and do not have much competition.  If you flag and don’t blog for some time, you rapidly slip down the rankings.

There is nothing so disheartening as to be inspired and write a cracking piece that you are very proud of, only to find that your website statistics say that nobody has read it or your email inbox or blog comment box immediately gets swamped with some really trashy messages written by morons and ne’er-do-well spammers.  Furthermore, you can usually tell that other bloggers have been trying (rather badly) to maximise their rankings by commenting on other blogs (yours), when you see the same message (usually misspelt but generally praiseworthy) on a number of blogs that you run – a dead giveaway.

There are many reasons you may have to start a blog on your business website but at the end of the day, you have to accept that the website blog is there almost entirely to attract visitors who have entered a search term on Google (or Yahoo) that matches in some way with your services.  If you think you can go in for some shortcuts by indulging in some plagiarism by lifting phrases or even whole passages from other peoples’ blogs or websites and changing a few words, think again!  Google is on to that with their new analysis tool “Panda” that can spot plagiarism a mile off and whether or not it has been written by rote in an impersonal way.  Search engine optimisation (SEO for short) is not so much as a black art as some suggest, but rather a way to ensure that your blog gets noticed.  Much if the mystery is taken out of it using software but you still have to write original work in an interesting way, otherwise you will not get the results you were hoping for.

Writing a good blog always takes longer than you think.  It gets harder to be inspired once you have covered all the relevant ground in your business and research is the big factor in consuming time you may not have.  Finding good and relevant hyperlinks with other websites to illustrate your points is time consuming but always a good idea, especially if the links are reciprocated by agreement of the other website owner.

Have I put you off blogging yet?  If I have, then you were not cut out to be a blogger and your business through your website could well suffer.  Publishing a series of blogs takes some business planning, resolve and time and if you don’t want to or cannot spare the time, you can always get a specialist to do it for you.  The expense to take route can range from the very cheap freelancer to the very expensive PR company.  As always, it is a balance of assessing the benefits against the cost.  At the cheap end, you may be lucky to find a low maintenance blogger who knows sufficient about your business to get inside your head and write credible prose.  At the expensive end, the PR company who crucially must know your business sector,will really have to get good results to satisfy the budget balancing.  I strongly recommend that you go for a guarantee to protect your position in the event that the PR company fails to get the right results.

Getting the right results is not, as may be suggested by the foregoing, going to be that difficult.  It takes planning,  proper resourcing, some originality and above all, a relentless focus.  Once you have mastered the mechanics of blogging, it is a great way to get your business messages across to Jo Public and other businesses.

Posted by philgnorris 3 october 2011 - The author, Philip Norris, a keen observer of the human condition, is Principal Consultant and Managing Director of Norris Management Ltd.  In a long and varied career, Phil has been a Programme and Project Manager for high profile projects in the Construction and Transportation fields.  In recent years, he has provided much needed support to businesses as a creative copywriter of websites, blogs, reports and other promotional material