This week is “Mailbag Week” where I answer some of the questions recently asked by my beloved readers, customers, and colleagues.

Q. Our business has been considering developing a blog as one way of reaching our customers. What is the best course of action for us to take?

A. Congratulations on your decision to incorporate a blog with your website! A weblog can offer many advantages to most any business including:

  • Blogging promotes brand awareness and brand building. By blogging, you can interact directly with your customers or if you do not want to monitor comments you can still use your blog for sharing company news, product information, offer advice, and more.
  • Blogging can also help your site excel with the search engines. Most articles posted (try to make them 300 words or longer) will be picked up and indexed by Google giving your business wider exposure and deeper search engine penetration. Using a platform such as WordPress with the appropriate SEO plug-ins activated can help your blog maximize its effectiveness.
  • Blogging can also enhance your internal team building effort. By carefully selecting a team of writers, you can have different members of your company share their knowledge and expertise. Appoint a lead blogger to oversee the process to make sure that a variety of articles are developed and that each blogger stays on message. A side benefit of team blogging is that we now know Google favors blogs with multiple bloggers (authors) for possible inclusion on their Google News site. Therefore, if you manage a well written and professional blog you could find Google is your chief ally.

Feel free to drop me a note to discuss your personal needs. Although your webmaster should be able to upload the blog for you, he/she may need assistance with the theme, plug-ins, categories, and more.