Does your company have a blog yet? While they aren’t right for every business, blogging can serve a number of business purposes. Let’s look at three common examples of blog business strategies to help you decide which one might be right for your venture.
Blogging as a Marketing Tool
Blogs can be effective marketing tools. For example, you might use them to show off new products or to drive more traffic to your website as a whole. This blog business strategy is when your blog indirectly brings in money by promoting the larger business to a targeted audience. The blog brings in leads and sells them on whatever you offer.
Blogging as a PR Tool
Blogging can equally be an important public relations tool. In this case, your company or organization would use a blog to build and maintain a community. You can gather feedback from visitors. You can directly communicate with your customers (and actually answer their questions and concerns). You can share company news. And you can build your, or your company’s, reputation as an authoritative source of industry information.
Blogging as a Business Model
Business blogging doesn’t always involve adding a blog to an existing company’s Web presence. Sometimes the blog is the business. This is when you use the blog to directly make money. You can do that with advertising. You might run an affiliate blog. Or you might even sell your own products directly on the blog itself (like an author using a blog in place of a sales-oriented static website to sell their books).
How do you use blogging as a business strategy? Tell us about it in the comments.
Note: This was originally published on September 12, 2012.
