Blogging for Business

I decided to write about business blogging because this is an up and coming worldwide trend and many Singaporean firms will eventually be asking questions about corporate blogs. Let’s start by addressing the 3 misconceptions that prevent companies in Singapore and the rest of Asia to start blogging for business.

Misconception #1:

“Blogging is simply for individuals to put their diaries online.”

Not true. Web management giants like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and Flickr have corporate blogs.

Perhaps you reason that their business is very Web related.

But what about car manufacturing giant General Motors or airline manufacturer Boeing and photography equipment supplier Kodak?

These are among some of the more well-known corporations who believe in the value of creating and maintaining blogs.

Misconception #2:

“I have an official website. Isn’t this good enough?”

Nowadays, every company, whether a multi-national corporation or a home office operating out of a bedroom, has a website describing their company, products and services.

However, this is called a static site, where information is plonked in and the content is seldom changed. It is a laborious process to update such a site and to add information about your fast-growing corporation. As a result, quite a number of business websites are appallingly outdated.

But a greater handicap of such static websites is its lack of interactivity. You may put your entire portfolio on your site, but you do not know who is looking at it, whether they are interested, whether they will remain interested, or whether they have questions about your products and services. In short, you have no communication with your customers, potential customers and industry partners.

Having a corporate blog will solve the above problems.

A corporate blog can be updated instantaneously in real-time. This has many advantages which I will discuss in a subsequent entry on “Advantages of Business Blogging”

A corporate blog also allows viewers to leave comments and to link to your site.

Misconception #3:

“Build the website and the visitors will come”

This is at most a fond dream.

In the former era of static sites, companies labored over the design and content of their websites, as this is the only way to attract viewers.

However, with blogs, you can now actively drive web traffic to your blog as well as your official website.

A survey in 2007 reported that there are 70 million blogs floating in the blogosphere, and the number grows at 120,000 new blogs each day, and that was last year’s survey!

Suffice to say that this is a trend worth observing and tapping on.

Don’t wait till your competitors have jumped on the bandwagon before you learn the advantages and the profit you can reap through business blogging for your company.