Boost Website Traffic with a Corporate Blog

What is a Corporate Blog?
A blog is short for weblog. It is a dynamic page that allows easy frequent updates. Mainstream use of the blog typically includes opinions, social networking and personal exploration. A corporate blog is most often used for breaking news, tips and tricks, executive briefs and observations. A corporate blog can be more advanced with categorization, custom templates and contact forms. Careful attention should be paid to ensure your blog matches your site’s branding. With a little customization, a blog can look exactly like your other pages.

Wikipedia Blog Definition

Why Would I Want a Blog?
Blogs offer many potential benefits to a business depending on your goals and usage of the medium. The benefits include the following.

Search Engine Friendly Content
Google and other search engines reward sites that are updated often and that have lots of content. The architecture of blogs make it very easy for search engines to scan especially because of descriptive links and robust titles.

Establish Credibility with Visitors
Focused corporate blogs allow companies an opportunity to post highly relevant materials about their particular industry. Over time, the blog will become a information resource than lends credibility to the company and/or its employees.

Interact with Visitors
Most blogging software includes the ability for visitors to comment on posts. This interactively brings life to the discussion and fosters an informal conversation with potential customers. Ultimately, this enhances the relationship.

Linked in with Blogging community
Blogging tools allow connectivity to a community. For example, visitors to blogger.com can see blogs that were recently updates and search all the blogging websites. Go ahead...search for the latest buzzword or even your companies product. You will be surprised what you will find.

Get Inbound Links
Once your site becomes established and is recogized for hosting great content, inbound links will follow. For example, there is a branding website that is highly regarded as an industry leading source of ideas has a huge following and gains more links with each post. This is a highly effective method of gaining traffic and climbing search engine rankings.

How do I get one?
Many free blogging software packages are availabe. A few popular types Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad and Movable Type. The setup ranges anywhere from 5 minutes to a full day depending on the level of customization and configuration. The basic steps are create an account, name the blog, choose a template and customize. It is advisable to host your blog on your web server or have a real domain point to the blog for marketing purposes. Obviously, a name like mytestname.com is easier to remember than http://mytestname.blogspot.com.

Summary
Blogs offer companies a low cost method of marketing on the internet. The benefits of offering relevant content are tremendous. The latest statistics indicate 80,000 new blogs are created everyday. That is about one per second. The easiest way to experience blogging is to try it. It will only take you about 5 minutes to setup a basic account. Opportunity awaits...get blogging.