On my usual commute to the office last week, I picked up one of my favourite free papers and found an interesting article on the art of blogging, it inspired me to share this information coupled with my own with the ecademy group.

What is a blog?

Blog is the abbreviated form of Web Log, it’s effectively a way of logging anything, be it news articles, pictures, diary entries, or random thoughts. If you’ve surfed the internet for any length of time, you will have come accross them numerous times. They will appear as diary entries, listed by date.

There are few companies that wouldn’t benefit from using a blog, so how can it be made useful to those that would?

How can I use this Blog?

Blogging is not a direct selling tool, so get away from this idea straight away. Likewise, stepping over the line from professional website to personal diary is also not advisable, though this can change depending on the services you provide. If you want to use a blog to help sell your products or services rather than turn people away, then it needs to be done right!

The ultimate goal

Your website is (or at least should be) an important tool in selling your products or services online, you could be selling products directly, taking bookings, taking enquiries or just using it to showcase your work. The most successful websites fulfill 3 basic criteria:

• They Bring people to the website
• They Keep people on the website
• They make people Return to the website

Your blog should work in tandem with these and be seen as one and the same. You should provide plenty of links from one to the other to ensure maximum coverage.

Bring

First of all a blog is going to be full of words, if you can keep these words focussed around your business, do. Then when surfers are looking for your services on the search engines, your blog will hopefully come up depending on the competition. Simplify these words to what your customers would actually search for. If you’re a will writer, put the word ‘Will’ and ‘Wills’ in there as much as possible. If you’re an art magazine distributer, use ‘Art’, ‘Magazine’. I’m always amazed when some clients are able to write paragraphs about their business and manage to complately skirt around the main topic without mentioning their main product of service!

Without even concentrating on the content, the tips above will bring people from the search engine to your blog.

The next step is to make them want to visit your website or get in touch with you in some way. This part is much more complicated as you can’t make a stranger ‘want’ to click on a link any more than you can make them want to give you lots of money expecting nothing in return.

Keep

So, you’ve followed the above exactly, your potential customer is now sitting on a page full of random keywords about your business and is confused at the list of semi-random keywords. This will scare off even the most web savvy person. So we now need to re-arrange them into something that will not only talk about your business but will be interesting and suggest that there is more information to learn by sticking around and/or visiting your website.

Find an interesting sector about your company, is there a question you’re asked a lot which you could expand on? Does the law or market change often enough for you to give tips and advice? Go in depth about one aspect at a time, write out the titles of several blogs at once, this will ensure you can keep the information for one out of the other thus keeping it simple, easy to read and educational. Also don’t hurry to get all blogs on at once, one or two a week is a good number to stick to. Any more and the demand for the surfer to return quickly is too great and they will lose interest, any slower than say once per month and users will forget to come back for the next entry. New topics will keep the search engines happy and so will bring in new clients more easily but don’t forget those people who have already seen you and need more evidence.

I am a web designer in Watford, so my next few blog topics will be: How to get higher in google search engines, How to judge website quality behind the aesthetics, Writing for web sites, Questions to ask your web designer, Cutting the costs; how to know if you’re being ripped off, what is shared hosting, vps and dedicated server and how much should I be paying.

Once you’ve picked a title for this edition, bullet-point all the information you want to put accross, and leave it for another day. When you come back to it, check the order and start to expand on each section, remember to keep putting your top words in as often as possible without losing grasp of the english language.

AVOID JARGON LIKE THE PLAGUE

As a web design company, I could talk about HTML, XML, XHTML, JAVA, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, SQL etc.
In this article alone, I could talk about META tags, Keywords, Keyword distribution and placement, H1 tags, and many more. Avoiding the use of these means I can spend time explaining the subject of the blog without losing my readers in lists of random letters.

Return

The blog you write needs to cover enough information on that topic to make it genuinely useful and interesting to your end user. An IT professional might tell you how to speed up your computer in a few easy steps or how to use Outlook. A mortgage advisor may talk about the current best lenders or how to improve on adverse credit. If all has gone well, your reader now has a higher opinion of you and your company than when they started, they will begin to trust your advice and judgment, but you now need to start releasing more blogs, cover other topics, let these people know that there is more to come. Three paragraphs ago, I’ve told you what I have coming next. Other techniques would be to follow nature, when you’ve finished your blog, let the words slowly flow on to the next topic and finish letting the readers know that you will continue another day. If possible release the blogs on the same day(s) each week or let them know when it’s due so hopefully you will not only have their attention and a brownie point in their mind, you’ll also have a diary entry in their calendar.

“Hi Mike, I need my web site done, do you know a good web designer in Watford?”
“Funny you should say that, I’ve been following a really good one online, I have his web site address in my PDA”

That’s my goal, and hopefully yours too.

It’s also worth a note that when this reader does visit your site, make sure they have something nice to look at and that it’s as up to date as your blog, keep them running in tandem.