Blogging is a great way for people to express themselves online, share their feelings and to write about and share their passions. Blogs can also be a powerful media for businesses and organizations as well. A business that blogs can be seen as a more personable company and if done properly can help a business be more relevant in its field. Blogging as a business though is not entirely an easy task… that is if you want it to be a successful blog and marketing tool.

A serious business blog is one that posts frequently and usually on a schedule. Whether you post weekly, biweekly or monthly, having relevant content that is delivered in a fresh perspective and a personable yet professional manner is also very important. Achieving these goals is often easier said than done. A serious business blog that follows these guidelines is not a free venture monetarily. If you have employees write your articles and have them reviewed and edited, you are looking at the labor costs for their pieces, or as is the practice sometimes, you can hire a freelance writer to put the posts together for your business. The model you go with is up to you, however having employees who are knowledgeable about your business and field can yield a more professional read.

Blogging is also a great tool for search optimization, but be careful not to play onto this too much; writing naturally in this case will pay off just as well if not better than writing a post then altering it to plug in as many keywords as you can. Keyword count in quite a few blogs is a huge distraction and often does not help the search ranking at all. Write a post as though you were writing an article for a trade related publication. One important thing to consider though is to have your blog on the same domain or at least make it a sub-domain of your business site. Hosting your blog on wordpress.com or any other service, or creating a new domain just for the blog just doesn’t make sense. Keep everything on one domain and help your SEO efforts. Another thing that should also be said here is once you post something, leave it alone unless you find out later on there is an error in it. Changing the content of your individual posts by a few words to feed the myth that “fresh content” is rated higher by search engines is just a waste of time. Frequent posting will help in the sense that you have more content to be rated by the major search engines, but editing everything every couple of months does nothing to further boost these ratings.

One last thing to consider when starting your business blog is to consider promoting your new blog. This step is very important if you want regular readers early on. Consider promoting your blog on your business’ social media outlets if they exist (if you do not have business pages on the major social media outlets, consider creating one) and one nice ‘old school’ method are to send out post cards to your regular clients and customers informing them of your new blog and encourage them to read and contribute though comments and subscriptions.

As you can probably tell from the last few paragraphs, a starting a serious business blog is not necessarily for the faint of heart. But for those of you that do take this step, the initial investment plus effective planning and well written posts can definitely pay off in terms of new business, returning clients, and search engine placement.