Blogs for Business

New Zealand Blogs for Business

Blogs benefit your company or cause in many ways – they give you a platform to keep your audience regularly updated with news and tips, and create a two-way conversation community, bringing you closer to your target market.

• Blogs
• Internet

Blogging in a professional capacity is a growing online marketing technique for many businesses - have you thought about creating a New Zealand blog for your business or organisation?

Blogs are a brilliant way to share your knowledge with others, gain traffic to your website and connect with potential clients, customers or supporters. Online blogging software is easy to use, and is beneficial to write about the happenings within your business, link to your resources, and keep a close, two-way connection with an interested audience.

Blogs were once the realm of personal musings, but today blogs are used by a growing number of businesses. With a blog, you can:

• Entertain and inform
• Add personality to the online face of your business
• Raise issues that are relevant to your business and your customers
• Give voice to your company's employees
• Improve sales

Writing a blog will take time, but it may be worth the effort for your business. Topical, interesting and informative blog posts will not only bring more visitors to your website; they'll keep customers coming back for more.

Blogs are fast to update, and beat using problematic coding and uploading (or contacting web designers) if you have regular news or incite, but are short on time and money.

Top Tips for Professional Blogging:

• Use a sharp, minimalist template. Readability is key to a blog, as you want to sustain a reader's attention. Beginners are advised to stick with a white background.
• Use pictures to dress up your blog. This will give it a more professional appearance, and create breaks from the text in your page.
• Link to authoritative sites. These sites should be well-known and frequently referred to within your industry. When search engine robots visit your blog, they will find these links and your blog will benefit by association.
• Create posts to link to pages on your website. The aim of professional blogging for many is to bring traffic to your website, so make sure you have keywords that link seamlessly to pages within your site.
• Post Frequently. The only way to continue to get an audience is to regularly update, keeping people interested and coming back. Two or three times a week should suffice, but the more the better.
• Create a live feed. It is a good idea to syndicate your blog to allow visitors to subscribe to your feed via an aggregator like RSS. This allows them to be notified of your updates as soon as you post.

Check out the Greenpeace blog for an example of a professional blog with good layout, content and overall execution. You can also check out the NZS.com blog which is updated regularly with news and hot tips for New Zealanders.

Usability : User Behaviour images from Flickr: Hanny, Clean Study Bag and Corporate.