Blogs are internet publications that journal the author’s thoughts, opinions, and interests.  They are like a personal journal that gives the world a look into the author’s life.  The author is called a blogger.

When used in a corporate setting, a blog can be a great tool.  Corporate blogs can be utilized as marketing tools in order for a business to sell their particular services and products.  They are published on the internet with the backing of the corporation.

Today many businesses are using corporate blogs to help reach their target audience – their customers.  It helps the company become recognized as experts in their particular field.  It shows not only their customers but also their competitors that they know what they are talking about, especially when it comes to what they are trying to sell.

Corporate blogs are being used in conjunction with more traditional methods of advertising, such as radio ads, print publications, television commercials and more.  The blogs main function is to reach the company’s target audience, but that is not the only reason for adding a blog to your company’s webpage.

Other reasons to use corporate blogging:

You could use your corporate blog as a way to build an intimate relationship with your audience instead of as selling tool.  While it is all right to use a blog as a selling tool, you can set up a separate blog to be used as a public relation tool.  This allows you to interact with other customers, your customers to respond to each other, and provides you with some great, reliable feedback from your customers on the products and services you are selling.

Corporate blogs are also a good way for your employees or members on a project team to keep up with what is going on in the business.  They will be able to openly discuss ideas on how to make your products better and how to make projects run smoother.  They also serve as online ‘meetings’ when it is difficult for all of the project members to get together at one time and you have pertinent information to impart to them.

Corporate blogs should be easy for your audience to read.  Try not to fill them with technical jargon that your readers will not understand.  Plus blogs are conversational.  Your audience will be able to ‘talk’ on it with each other as if they were old friends.  It offers them a place to voice their opinions and express any ideas they may have about the blog topic.  This allows you to read their thoughts and get ideas on how to make your product – and your corporate blog – better.

Corporate blogs that are set up properly will become popular and you will find that other companies will link their corporate websites to yours.  The more companies that link to yours the better your standing will be in the industry as an expert in your field.

Here is a description of the six most popular varieties of corporate blogs being used today.  Each of these blogs has their own unique style and characteristics.

The Sales Blog

Sales blogs are designed solely to sell or advertise your company’s services and products.  Someone in your company will write this blog and it is targeted towards potential and current clients.

The Relationship Blog

Relationship blogs are designed to build up the company and client relationship.  Your target audience is considerably smaller than the audience of your sales blog.

The Branding Blog

This is the type of corporate blog you will want to use if you are looking for a way to strengthen your company’s brand.  Your employees are the ones that write this blog and your target audience is the same as the audience in your sales and relationship blog.

The Knowledge Blog

The knowledge blog is an internal blog that imparts information to your employees regarding things such projects they are working on, business intelligence, news and anything else related to the company and is for your employees.

The Collaboration Blog

The collaboration blog is used for employees working on a particular project.  It provides the employees with research tools and a place to discuss the project.  Members of the team usually write this blog.

The Culture Blog

Used to build a personal relationship between your employees, the culture blog is a company social blog that usually has nothing to do with work-related matters.

If you are looking for a way to enhance the relationship you have with your customers or your employees, consider using a corporate blog.  You can find free blog publishing services on the internet that are user-friendly.

The term ‘blog’ is a shorthand for the term ‘weblog’. Blogs are small websites, mini sites if you will.  The people who write them are known as bloggers and their entries on their blog are known as posts.  Posts are listed from the newest to the oldest with an archived section usually located along the side of the page.  By using special blogging software, bloggers can post about anything and their readers can post comments back, whether they are good, bad or indifferent, and this adds content to your blog.

The online community of bloggers is known as the blogosphere.  This vast community has its own way of doing things, from greeting newcomers to watching how blogs grow.  The blogosphere can help your blog grow as you gain a reputation of being an honest, resourceful blogger.  Be forewarned, however, that blogs have been taken advantage of.  There are some companies out there that simply publish spam blogs or ‘splogs’ that really have no value.  You can have an online blog that promotes your company.  You just need to make sure you do it in such a way that you contribute to the world blogosphere in a positive manner.

Before you even create your corporate blog it is a good idea to familiarize yourself with all of the rules that are followed in the blogosphere, even though these rules are not necessarily set in stone or followed perfectly.  You want your blog to be a success.  Understanding the rules is important.

The first and foremost rule of blogging is that your corporate blog must positively contribute to the blogging community.  You must have content that is real and informative.  They should provide more than just advertising of your services and products.  Disguising your advertisements as content is not going to work so it is up to you to determine what kind of information you are going to impart to your target audience that solves your need for marketing and the blogospheres need for strong content.

Instead of publishing a blog that is toned like a marketing brochure that sells your products, publish a blog that gives the consumer pertinent information about the product and then open up a discussion with your consumers regarding what they learned.  Allow them to speculate on your product and permit other bloggers to respond to your blog posts to get some valuable feedback.

While you may think that this is not going to work in your best interest, it actually will, especially if you can use it to build up an interest in your company without making the content feel as if it has an advertising tone to it.  The blogosphere is an excellent way of opening up additional doors to your company to provide it with recognition.

Be careful, though, because a corporate blog that is done improperly can also sabotage your business and cause problems that you may not have expected.  Unless you specifically set up your blog to approve all comments or posts before they go live you could open your company up to comments from customers that do not favor your company.  When this happens, you are left to address the customer’s comments and if you try to sweep them under the rug, your credibility will suffer.  Always be prepared for the negative comments and be ready to face them.  Responding to the negative actually makes you look professional and reliable.

In order to develop a good, solid reputation for your organization and the products or services you offer, try to keep your blog to issues that are neutral and will not bring harmful comments.  Once you are able to do this, you can explore other means of promoting your company through your blog, including traditional outlets of information, through your competitors and through other media.

You need to be confident in the products and services you are selling in order to make blogging work for you and your business.  If you are and you develop your corporate blog properly, you will build a good name for your company and your blog could top the search results for what you are selling.  If you do not feel confident about your business, then you may want to leave blogging for someone else.

There are a lot of benefits about blogging.  Blogs allow you to express who you are and what the business is all about.  You can blog on things you have gotten from the internet and treat your blog much like a personal internet site or website.

The blog has many different functions.  It is used as an advertising tool and helps you really push your business to the forefront of internet commerce. Using the powerful force of the internet, companies have the ability to make the blog a trusted source of information to buyers who will help the business grow.  There are millions, if not billions of people who surf the net every day and who will be willing to read your blog and respond accordingly.

While this applies well to big business, what about smaller business or home businesses? Can blogs work for them?  Of course.

Home based businesses are not much different from bigger businesses when it comes to blogging and the internet.  The only difference is that small businesses have less money to blog with and may not be able to afford their own blog format.  They must use free blogging sites and must use the templates provided by the blog hosting site.  The rest is no different and you can come up with a nice blog for free.

Home based or smaller businesses need to blog more frequently than bigger businesses.  You need to promote yourself more than big businesses.  As your business is off the beaten track, you need to have a web presence in a website so that you can look like a bigger business as far as the wb is concerned.  Blogging levels the playing field between larger and smaller companies.

In addition, let’s look at why you should blog to enhance your home based business:

• Blogs can be written by anyone without knowledge of programming language and html.  You can use a WYSIWYG format in order to just write your blog and have it look nice without knowing how it got that way.
• There is no hassle to putting on whatever you like on the blog, including pictures and videos. You can post whenever you wish.
• Blogs cannot be spammed as they are unrelated to email notifications.
• Blogs are very convenient so that you can make many are of them on a variety of topics.

There can be great profits with this free form of advertising as it costs nothing to get your business out there on the web.

Having a business blog does require your time and attention as well as patience for it to begin turning a profit for you.  In order to reach a goodly number of readers and customers, there are a few things you need to accomplish besides patience.

• You need to do regular updates to your blog in order to give your readers something to look for and anticipate.  You should blog at least three times a week.  You need to let your audience know you’re there and provide your audience with the most updated information.
• Your blog needs to allow for comments so that customers can give feedback and suggestions.  Your audience can feel like the blog is more interactive if they can say what they like about your company and its products.
• Don’t forget to have links to other sites on your web.  It helps your blog have more credibility and it is fun for your customers.
• Make your blog site look simple.  Have some white space and make it look attractive. Content must be good and must attract your audience into your blog.
• Remember your values and keep them intact.  This means that you have tons of patience, a good relationship with your audience and a nice conversational tone.  You will build your audience through these values.

Your business can be known throughout the world, just by creating the right kind of blog and by following the rules above.

Those businesses who blog have an advantage over their competitors.  Let’s take a look at the different advantages of blogging:

• Increased exposure. There are fourteen million blogs on the market and 80,000 blogs are being added to the internet every day. Thirty percent of those who use the net look at blogs.  This is a boon to companies who can easily advertise their product through the use of blogging.  Information can spread very easily through the internet world, particularly if you get great comments and have great content to your blogs.  It won’t be long until the blog is spread by means of forwarding to your blog to friends and family of those who were impressed by what you had to say about your product or service.
• Excellent means of Feedback. Because people can make comments on your product, you can understand what’s on the mind of those who are interested in your goods.  You can take action on any concerns your readers may have and you can learn what people like about your company.
• Halo-effect within the community. Bloggers are generally a helpful and friendly bunch of people. They will more than likely comment on your product so all you have to do is be active in doing your blog and respond to your comments.  Your product can become the latest internet craze if it is good enough and has a lot of comments.

In order to better market your product, you need to submit the blogs to search engines and to blog directories. Put in your blog’s URL and make sure there are active links within your blog. Your blogs must be valuable for the customer to read so that they keep coming back for more. You want them to keep clicking on your site for updates.

A blog is like having a daily trade show exposition.  The marketing chances for your product are available to anyone willing to put up a blog and keep it up.

RSS feeds are vital as part of your blogging experience.  This stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It involves using proper keyword phrases in order to generate a decent ranking in the search engines. People have a better chance of finding a highly ranked blog than they do a low ranking blog. The more traffic you get, the more sales come from your blog.

You need to use RSS in order to update news feeds that can be read for increasing your business.  This tool increases your business and your internet marketing ability.

If you are already a believer in the potential of business blogs in order to market your business and increase your marketing potential, you are ready to begin blogging.  Get in tune with your business’ mission and what it wants to accomplish before starting your blog.  Try to find out how and if a blog will be helpful in your business’ goals.

1. Read blogs that tell you how to blog and how not to blog. Use them in your reading in order to know how to do consumer blogs and what not to do when writing business-related blogs.
2. Do several test blogs to see what works the best. If you have success with your initial blogs, then set up a program of different blogs you can continue with.
3. Pay attention to the design of blogs.  Blog hosting places will give you templates to work with so you don’t have to design your own. If you wish to make it more personal, though, use a blog artist in order to design a blog that looks the way you want it to.
4. Select a topic.  It could be a bunch of products or you could have a blog for each additional product. It’s a good idea to get feedback from others before defining your objective regarding the topics you want to choose.
5. These are important safety measures when it comes to blogging:

• Include disclaimers in your blog if you are using legal or branded names in your blog.
• The legal aspect of the corporation should get involved in the education of senior management of how blogs can impact business practices.
• Have your own blogging practices and policies. Set who gets to be a blogger in your company and on what information you are allowing to be in the blog.
• No hard selling in your blog or you will have readers who don’t want to read your blogs?    make content updated, relevant and fresh;
• Make sure your company’s values are represented in the blogs.
• Make sure your employees use and read your blog.

6. Blog for at least twenty blogs before you introduce marketing.

7. Market your product or service.

8. Monitor who reads the blog and who comments on it.  Get this updated regularly and use those results to alter your blog.

9. Alter your blog if necessary. You can always change the design of the blog as long as your company’s identity remains clear.

10. Stay on task with regard to the topic involved.

11. If topics are unrelated, make them have broad appeal and interest.

12. Make sure to update the blog regularly, at least three times per week.

When you have followed the above rules, you will definitely benefit from having a company blog.