As social media gathers momentum in the online popularity stakes, organisations are beginning to use blogs for both internal as well as external communication purposes. Corporate blogs provide organisations the ability to build trust, connect with their target audiences at personal levels, collect useful feedback and foster win-win relationships.

Companies today are enjoying tangible returns from their blogging investment in the form of an increased number of business opportunities, lead generation, sales, partnerships and press coverage. Companies need to employ a well researched blogging strategy that builds community goodwill and this goodwill often translates to significant branding and sales gains. Successful corporate blogging sets off a profitable chain reaction starting with a real intent on the blogger (organisations) part to provide lasting value and connect with their target audience by sharing engaging and useful content e.g. latest product/services research reports, industry/economy information, general help, relevant posts to all discussion topics & ideas.

The way in which the blogging audience responds to this content is key to building win-win relationships. When the web-audience starts commenting, posting or tracking back to an internet community, it has a great ‘viral’ effect i.e. spreading out to the ‘blogosphere’. Additionally, companies can harness their customers’ views and behavioural knowledge from their posts.

These ideas enable an organisation to establish better ways to satisfy both their existing and future customer needs and thereby building goodwill. Another useful spin-off of corporate blogging is to boost your website’s search engine page ranking the regular publication of content is a proven SEO tactic.

In blogging it’s a common practice to provide a back-link to the thought originator, and it is through these backlinks that search engines generally distinguish the order of editorial rankings/popularity of your web content. Higher search engine page rankings lead to significantly higher visitation and more sales revenues. A co-ordinated and committed approach to blogging breeds success across your sales and marketing campaigns.

Leveraging the Advantages of Blogging

A blog is a serious platform to publish details of your company initiatives and announcing important communications to your business stakeholders and to the search engines. Using proven technical techniques you can easily leverage the ‘blogs for SEO’ strategy for a quick boost to your overall page ranking with key search engines as Yahoo and Google.

There is a huge number of dormant blogs on the Interrnet which reflect the fact that business had the idea of creating a blog, but the exercise of updating the blog was not being prioritised and the great idea of a blog fades away.  So if you make the commitment of commencing a blog make sure the blog becomes an integral part of your marketing communications platform and you comit resources to the blogs ongoing development. If you implement both of these elements your corporate blog will become a key platform for communicating with your existing and potential customers.