Using a blog for business purposes is becoming more popular and important. It is an easy way to generate new fresh content, and post this content in an easy to use CMS (content management system) format like wordpress. Using a blog for business purposes does however come with some best practices. Krishna De talks about some of the mistakes companies make when using blogging as part of their on line strategy.

The Blog Look

Creating the company blog with the same look and feel as the business website is important to continue the continuity for the end user. If your customer has arrived at your blog and they follow a link through to the rest of the site, they should not feel that they have come to a different website. The visitor has already made themselves feel comfortable with your blog and they have decided to look further. Changing the look and feel on your visitor means that they will have to start again; getting comfortable with your site. This look and feel comfortableness will apply in both directions if your user is going from your blog to our site or vise versa.

Who are you

Making sure that your blog tells your visitor about you is important. The word blog is derived from the words web log. It is an online diary and contains thoughts and impressions of the writer or the team with in the company who are contributing to the blog. It is important to help establish the writer’s credibility and an about us page helps the reader to connect with the person who’s insight they are reading.

Spread the word

Using the social media that blogs take advantage of such as blogcatalog, technorati, digg, feedburner and others is also needed. These services have huge numbers of online users that can be directed to your blog if you use their services correctly and frequently. Using their services may mean distributing your blog content or creating a social network of people who you can use to help promote your blog site to even more online users.

Blogs have become an important component of the internets everyday activities and business usage of blogs is constantly increasing. If you don’t have a business blog as yet it is probably time to start thinking about how you can incorporate one into your companies current online architecture.