Business blogging, or corporate blogging, has potential PR value for even small business owners. If you’re considering setting up a company blog for your small or online business, there are several things you might do with that business blog, including:
1. Using the business blog to present company news, or the owner’s (or other high level executive’s) take on industry news issues.
2. Using the business blog as a way to educate the public, and more importantly your target market, about your products, services, etc.
3. Using the business blog as a tool to offer free industry information or articles, as a means of then driving Web traffic to other areas of your business site.
By creating a business blog for any of those reasons, you also have a free or inexpensive, yet powerful, PR tool. There are a variety of public relations benefits to business blogging, such as:
1. The ability to disseminate news.
2. The ability to quickly and directly gather feedback from your target audience.
3. The ability to build a company or personal reputation as an authority source in an industry or niche.
In order to best take advantage of the PR benefits of blogging (sometimes referred to as the marketing benefits of blogging), it’s important to keep the blog honest and ethical by industry standards. As much as blogging can be a PR benefit, it can also lead to negative publicity just as easily (such as if you were to release false information or just hype about a new product release), so always keep your business motives in mind when deciding to launch a business or corporate blog, and when deciding whether to blog yourself or hire a ghost writer as your business blogger.
Jennifer, are you recommending that companies use ghost writers for blogs?
I don’t believe that’s what I said in the article. But the fact of the matter is that some business blogs will always be written by ghostwriters, and it’s a decision that has to be made with each individual case.