Blogging For Your Business - A Blog & Podcast About Blogging

There is probably no better way to create fresh content for your website and generate SEO with good content than by writing a blog. It's a natural and easy way to provide fresh content on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. And getting started may be easier than you think!

Last night, in her presentation for the Social Media Club Detroit EDU series, Nikki Little of Identity PR gave a lot of good advice on starting a blog for your company. The first thing you should do, she said, is set up the goals for your blog and choose a platform to host it on.

What goals should you set for your blog? It depends on what you want to get out of it. Is it a way to establish thought leadership in a particular niche? Is it a forum for shaping public opinion? Is it a way to convert customers into sales? Or is it a way to share your thoughts on your industry? There are a lot of different reasons to have a blog. Figure out what your top one or two reasons are and then always hold your content up to that mirror to see if it's measuring up.

What platform should your blog be on? Our blog here is on Typepad and has been since 2006. But the most popular one today is WordPress. It's free, offers a lot of extra plug-in apps, has a wide variety of formats and templates to choose from and is fairly easy to use once you have it set up. It's the format Nikki sited as her favorite. She also talked about Tumblr, if your blog is more photo or video oriented. And then there's Medium, a new format for "beautiful writing" develop by one of Twitter's co-founders. And finally, something I didn't know about, she pointed out that you can now blog straight from your LinkedIn profile. There are many other formats – look into them and choose whatever's right for you.

Once you do start blogging, make sure you make it interesting. Using storytelling techniques to tell your company's story will help you make sure you're creating content that people will enjoy and come back for more!

After the event, we recorded a Social Media Club Detroit podcast to give a brief overview of Nikki's presentation and further discuss blogging. It features, Nikki, myself, Billy Strawter and Joanna Dueweke. I've embedded it below for your listening pleasure.

Social Media Club Detroit podcast – Blogging for Business 101

Let me know what you think. I'd love to check out your company blogs and see how you're doing. Just leave me a link in the comments below.along with a little note to say what your blog's main goal is.

Mike McClure, Blogging about blogging.