Business blogs — like the one you’re reading now — offer many advantages to companies pursuing an inbound marketing approach. Done right, a business blog can position your company as a thought leader, boost your search engine rankings on important keywords, and turn interested prospects into sales leads.

The trick is, you can’t just build a blog and let it sit.  You’ve got to write, publish, share, promote, write, publish, share, promote, and keep that process going!

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when starting your business blog:

• Host your blog on your own domain.
• Design your blog to match your brand and your existing website. It should feel seamless.
• Let visitors subscribe to receive automatic email updates of your latest blog posts. (This enables your blog to serve dual purpose as a newsletter, if you’d like.)
• Find blog article topics through keyword research, Google Alerts, from conversations with customers, and from inside your organization.
• Establish a consistent production schedule, and try to stick to it.
• Assign a blog “owner” inside or outside the organization to keep the blog publishing on track.
• Connect your blog to your social media profiles where you can share your latest posts and/or have them fed directly to your profile pages.

Certainly there is much more we can say about business blogs but we think you get the idea.  When thinking about 2011, put a business blog in your plans!

Need help? Explore our blog design services.

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My takeaway from the conversation was this:

Winners repeat the right things over and over, knowing the outcomes will improve.
Losers do something once or twice, figure it didn’t work, and never do it again.

Let’s not confuse this with the definition of insanity, which is repeating the same mistakes over and over expecting a different outcome. In online marketing there are certain actions one must undertake time and time again, often over several weeks and months, before a desired result is achieved. Creating content, building links, participating in social media, improving the conversion process on your website, nurturing leads through email, analyzing analytics data, are some of these actions.

To win in online marketing you’ve got to remain steadfastly dedicated to performing the tasks that will eventually build your rankings, increase traffic, and boost your sales. Does that mean you keep doing something that’s obviously going nowhere? Of course not! But don’t assume that because you don’t see dramatic results the first time you try something that it’s dead in the water.

Look for increasingly incremental improvements in rankings, traffic, conversions and as long as that improvement is growing steadily, keep it up!

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