CT Biz Blogs

When you ask “Why do I need a blog?” the ultimate answer is “to build your business.”

Blogs build your business through sharing your expertise and connecting with your customers. When you post on your blog, maybe not daily, but on a regular basis, you start to build a relationship with your readers.

They might already be customers or clients who heard about your blog through your newsletter, flyer, email, business card, link from your main website, or even a sign in your shop by the cash register. They might be people who haven’t used your services yet, but are looking for information. They find you through a search engine or link from another blog, see that you are knowledgeable and friendly, and then become customers or clients.

To build your business through your blog, you need to bring people to it, and help them find it. You need to build traffic.

You can bring traffic to your blog in several ways, on the internet. Here are some of them:

• Linking to other blogs of interest
• Leaving comments on other blogs
• Announcing new entries to the specialty blog search engines, such as Technorati
• Building page rank for the major search engines such as Google or Yahoo!
• Writing posts people want to read

Each of these is worthy of post on its own. I’ll start with the first bullet item tomorrow, but here’s a quick example.

One of my goals is to show you examples of good business blogs, and explain why I think they’re good. I’ve written about several blogs, and several of the bloggers mentioned have left comments, and linked back to this blog in their own blogs. Lawyer Andrew Ewalt put a link to CTBizBlogs in his left sidebar list. Rich, of Aldo Coffee, even mentioned me in his latest post. It wasn’t for the “link love” that I wrote about them, and they left comments, but those are nice pluses. True networking happens when you can help each other, even a tiny bit.

There are no “become #1 with a bullet on Google!” tips here, because I don’t think the quickie, gaming-the-system tricks work in the long term. But if you’re serious about your business, then you’re in it for the long term, anyway. And the benefits from the work you do now on building your blog will only increase over time.

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Edited on 9/19/05 to add the last bullet point. I’m embarrassed that I left that out. Write in haste, repent at leisure.