There are a lot of reasons that your business should engage in regular blog posting. SEO companies will tell you in great detail about the benefits of regular internal backlink building and how it directs PageRank for different keywords onto different landing pages, and so forth. Social media marketers will tell you about how blog posting is a great way to get your followers building their own backlinks to your content, which is the most affordable SEO
But there’s another, much deeper, reason you should have a custom-made blog put together by an SEO professional. Yes, it’s important to get the SEO benefits, and it’s important to give the crowd their Like and Pin and +1 buttons. But it’s far more important for your business in the long run that you communicate with your customers.
It’s easy enough to plop out a blog post about some new thing or other that you’re doing with your business. It’s easy to market something in a blog post. But it’s also frankly kind of boring. The most effective blog posts don’t just state facts, they stir up opinions, too.
One of the best was to start a conversation among your followers is to find something that one of your competitors is doing and talk on your blog about why it’s wrong. Say, for example, you have an iPhone game that’s similar to a popular game. Posting a few blog posts about what the more popular game is doing wrong and how you’ve avoided making the same mistakes will get a lot of traction (and probably get you a few new customers as well.)
Another thing you can do to communicate effectively with your clientele is to reply to their feedback openly. If someone offers a valid piece of criticism, don’t hide it — publicize it. Tell everyone about it, and then fix it and tell everyone what you did to fix it. That kind of response wins a HUGE amount of respect from your customer base, and they’ll be loyal to you just because of the feeling that you listen to and respect them.
Blogs are extraordinarily powerful tools for several reasons — just be sure you’re taking advantage of all of them.
