Blog for business

There are advantages in hiring a professional to do your blogging for you. A huge amount of business and information is exchanged online. Your business must have a strong online presence to stand out from your competitors. Therefore having a quality blog is an important aspect of getting yourself or your business noticed.

When people search for a business you want your name to come up close to the top of the list. And blogging helps you to credential yourself as a market leader or an expert. It also helps search engines to find you.

The Madrigal approach to blogging

Madrigal encourages its clients to blog but we recognise that it is often difficult to make the time. We can help you to start by going through the basics to get your blogging ball rolling or we can do your blogging as a ghostwriter (that is writing your blog on your behalf).

Blogging is important for business

At the beginning of 2013 there were 156,000,000 blogs on the Internet. An estimate of the number of websites in 2012 was 645,000,000 (645 million). Using these figures a quarter of the world’s websites are blogs. This is also 30% more blogs than in 2010.

Some statistics from Hubspot show the importance of blogging to business:

• Nearly 40% of US companies use blogs for marketing purposes. (eMarketer, August 2010)
• 92% of companies who blogged multiple times a day acquired a customer through their blog. (HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing, 2012)
• 81% of marketers rated their blog as useful or better. (HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing, 2012)
• 31% more bloggers today than there were three years ago. (eMarketer, August 2010)
• 46% of people read blogs more than once a day. (HubSpot Science of Blogging 2010)

6 reasons to blog

There are six main reasons that you should be blogging:

1. for enjoyment—enthusiasm is hard to bottle
2. to establish thought leadership—show you know your industry
3. to improve your search engine optimisation—obviously important
4. for inbound marketing (content marketing)—getting people to come to you
5. to improve online sales—demonstrating knowledge of your product builds trust
6. to build relationships with customers—take advantage of the digital marketplace

Not so important blogging terms to know

We do like new words so here are some terms that you might come across when you are reading about the world of blogging:

• blogosphere —the blog network
• blawg—a legal blog
• photoblog—image blog
• vlog—video blog
• splog—a blog for spamming

How to be a good blogger

Here are the most simple instructions on how to be a successful blogger

1. Do it consistently
2. Do it often
3. Be relevant, topical and up-to-date
4. Be passionate, interesting and show your personality
5. Snappy headlines, strong images, short sentences, short paragraphs
6. Don’t plagiarise content or steal images (but it is OK to borrow ideas, modify images, link-back, seek permission, acknowledge, share …)
7. Bloggers code of conduct—A bloggers code of conduct has been proposed, which makes good sense to us, so we support it!
8. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
9. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
10. Ignore the trolls—take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so
11. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
12. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.