I can’t remember who said it, but I’m sure it was a well-known and successful businessman, that business is all about building relationships. Never a truer word uttered. It’s not easy selling anything in an instant.
If you want to develop a customer base for your web business, you must develop a relationship with them, and there is no better way of achieving this than either email newsletters or blogs. And now there are 150 million blogs!
So, what are blogs? Well, you’re reading one now (unless you subscribed to my RSS feed and you’re reading this on a feedreader). It’s really just a website designed for posting regular journal entries – like an online newsletter.
And as a webmaster, and perhaps business owner, why should you blog? Lots of good reasons. The first and most important is to develop a relationship with your customers, visitors or readers with regular content of value.
There are many ways for you to stay in contact from news, views, comments, controversy, offers, deals, insider information or customer support. Blogs are interactive as visitors can give you feedback by adding comments.
Infact, some of the more popular blogs have created a community around the blogger, it’s readers and comments they leave on the blog. Take a look at problogger or Clicknewz for some good examples of community blogs.
A blog gives you access to the ‘blogosphere’, a vibrant source of millions of new visitors, readers and customers. Take a look at technorati, regarded as the blog search engine, to see inside this new world.
RSS feeds are available on blogs. RSS is Really Simple Syndication, which delivers your posts direct to their PC as soon as it’s been written by you. Once subscribed, your readers receive all of your wisdom automatically.
Blogs are search engine friendly too. This is especially true if you commit to posting regular content. Google loves regularly updated websites and lots of fresh content, which blogs provide.
Plenty of excellent reasons to start blogging. So, why don’t you make it your new year’s resolution…
