A few months back I wrote about Blogging for your business, what is known as CEO blogging. This is where the internal voice of the company, the day to day successes and the behind the scenes talk happen in an interactive forum. The blog is usually connected to the main website at an address like http://www.companyname.com/blog or even http://blog.companyname.com. It is connected so that the views know that there is some real authority to the conversation and that the viewer has access to a person that can really hear what they have to say. I don’t believe that the CEO should be the one to blog unless you have a media department to support them. Just because they are the head of the organization, does not make them the best person on the team to blog. Publishing a blog may be may be foreign and untested technology; Once you press publish, it’s out there for the world to see.

But I am a huge proponent for each company having a public web persona and a blog personality that gets regular updates from within the organization. It humanizes you.
And gives you virtually unrestricted access to your audience. Take a look at the Whole Foods Blog, in which the CEO discusses how some regulatory issues about their business have required him to keep quite for now. Go back a few months to see how prolific he was in communicating with the public.

Some Business CEO Blogs Include –

Some quick business blogging tips:
Provide content – Don’t simply repost what other are saying, be the site that provides real content and real unique information. This information may be on your business, your industry or some other area in which you are specifically qualified to write about.
Keep it simple – Keep the blog site simple, there is no need to experiment with the latest and greatest in blogging software. Do your readers really have to see what the weather is in their home town? They can look outside for this, what they came here for is some insight that they cant get anywhere else.
Define what your prospective readers are looking for and stay on topic. Remember the goal is to educate and inform not necessarily to sell products. Web users are savvy, don’t try to trick them.
Integration – As mentioned before, keep the blog tied to your primary business site. It add creditability and makes it a whole lot easier for people to create a brand loyalty to you and your company.
Post 2-3 times a week on industry specific topics or issues related to your business. You need to build some initial momentum, once your traffic and feedback increase you will figure out just how often you need to blog in order to stay relevant to your customers.
Promote Promote Promote – The power of blogging is the active feedback from your customers. Put your blog and your website out there, blogging is not just a lead generation tool but it is really the way to build brand awareness and customer loyalty.

Don’t worry about the traffic to your site. It will be very low for a while, but by staying relevant to your customers and on topic the people who are interested will find you.

By enabling the comments on your blog you are creating an open forum for people to discuss, praise or criticize your company. Make sure that you require an email address for people that post, but you will take some bruises along the way. Its not all glamorous.

What does it take to start?
Also blogging should be FREE, there may be a few dollars spent on a template or some intital setup with your ISP but the barrier to entry is minimal. I would say that your budget to blogging should be less than $250 and it should take no more than a week to go from the “I’m going to do this stage” all the way through to the email to your customer telling them to “see my new blog”.

I challenge each and every one of you to have a personal or business blog set up by the end of the year. It’s not that tough! Let me know if you need any help.