Three Best Practices of Blogging - ISSUE 14 - 1/11/12

In today's world, information is constantly changing and what worked for a business owner in the past for acquiring new business, may not work in the present. You must strive to be the best everyday because if you don't, your competition most likely will. Search engines love blogs, and if you don't blog, your company's online presence will dwindle quickly and soon thereafter be overwhelmed by what other people are saying about you or your company and there's nothing you can do about it.

Before you start blogging, there are some things you need to know about it and some best practices for you to follow to ensure you are maximizing your time and your efforts.

First, in order for your efforts to be worth your time, you must blog on a regular basis. The search engines are looking for the most up-to-date and relevant information. This means that if you don't stay up with it, before long, your information will be outdated and irrelevant to what people are looking for. Depending on the amount of resources you have available to you, you should do your best to dedicate an hour a day to blogging. Before you know it, the search engines will be finding your articles and leading people to your blog which will then lead to more potential clients and therefore, more sales.

Second, make sure you are writing about topics that your potential clients will be interested in as well as topics relevant to your company. A perfect example of this is Best Western's Travel Blog - You Must Be Trippin'. In this blog you can find a wealth of information about travel to anywhere around the globe. In this blog, Best Western does not talk about themselves, rather a topic that pretty much anyone in the world would be interested in.

Lastly, don't forget to add some type of call-to-action and a way to interact with your followers so that you can build the necessary relationships and ultimately, build your business. If you don't then all your efforts will go to waste. One of the best aspects of a blog are that they are already equipped with a Comment section for your readers to share their thoughts and opinions, but since not everyone will be interested or confident enough to share their thoughts, you should incorporate a poll section into the sidebar. This will give you a very good idea of how many people are interested in the topics you write about, as well as the questions you ask.

To get more great business development information, visit www.suitedmarketing.com. We look forward to serving you.

If you would like more insight from the expert bloggers at MarketingProfs, take a look at the following online workshop hosted by the Chief Content Officer, Ann Handley (Twitter - @MarketingProfs), and her associate, Mark Collier.

How to Blog Effectively for Business (GF101)