Blogging Seminar

by Marsha Ward

Last Saturday I attended a seminar on Blogging. The main speaker was Dave Barnhart, whose business in Phoenix, Arizona, is called Business Blogging Pros. He also, naturally, has a blog for his business.

Here are some of the highlights of what I learned about how a blog can help a business owner, or by extension, a writer.

• It gets you Google juice. Google loves blogs, primarily because they always have new content. Therefore, your name or business name, can be on the top of the search engine lists if you blog with regularity.
• It's free exposure. Influential people, like newspaper reporters and magazine editors, read the blogosphere. They might need background for an article, or is could be a slow news day and your input is just the thing they want to highlight.
• It provides direct access for your clients/customers/readers. Once example Dave mentioned is GM Fastlane, wherein the management of a giant automobile company interacts with customers, actually providing customer service!
• It humanizes you and builds trust in you and your business. This leads to the possibility that customers will drive past your competitors to buy your products, even when they are priced higher!
• It leads to conversation in which your business is the topic.
• It improves your business's image. Having a blog today is comparable to having a website in 1994. It brands you as a forward thinking, cutting edge business. Websites are pretty static, but blogs are highly updatable. Businesses need both.
  

Dave pointed out the usefulness of using business blogs to educate and inform, to do customer service, and to target the customer's needs. Writers do the same things with their blogs, in a writerly way.