From The Australian, Entrepreneur:
Blogs save time and energy, writes Ed Charles | July 27, 2007
THE hype over blogs focuses on gossip and radical politics. What many people miss is the power of the blog as a marketing tool for small business and an alternative to e-newsletters.
BUSINESS BLOGS
• workingsolo.com.au
• blog.completepotential.com
• trevorcook.typepad.com
• www.benjaminchristie.com
• www.nobledentist.com.au/blog/index.php
• www.frankteam.com.au/blog
• blog.nowhiring.com.au
• www.barrett.com.au/blogs/suebarrett
• lukegoodwin.blogspot.com
Blogs offer superior features to static websites, sometimes cost nothing and are easy to use. They also increase a company’s chances of being found in web searches, saving money on search engine optimisation.
Anne Bartlett-Bragg, of the Faculty of Education at the University of Technology, Sydney, runs a mentoring program for young women entrepreneurs and is immersing them in social media.
She has been blogging since 2000 and is writing a PhD thesis on the power of weblogs. She says many web design companies don’t have the right philosophical approach to blogs, because they are technologically led rather than understanding the power of harnessing social media.
“I call them weblogs as a way of trying to move away from the Paris Hiltons,” she says of the gossip blog. Bartlett-Bragg says blogs are an ideal substitute for the e-newsletters that most of the women in her program send out. “It takes time but so do e-newsletters,” she says. “How many hours do you spend writing an e-newsletter? If it takes you four hours, split that over a month and that’s one hour a week writing something for your blog.”
All blogs incorporate RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a technology that allows people to subscribe and track when websites are updated, which is now a standard business tool built into Microsoft Outlook 2007. “I’m trying to make them think of a blog as their newsletter with RSS feeds,” Bartlett-Bragg says.
Human resources consultant Megan Tough of Complete Potential has been blogging for a year. She first set up a basic blog on the free service, Blogger.com, run by Google. “The reason I got into it is because I knew it was really good for search engine optimisation. It was a good strategy to get to the top of Google searches,” Tough says. Now she uses the free open-source platform WordPress on the complete potential.com domain and asked her IT consultant, Leah Maclean, to set it up and tailor the design.
Maclean, who helps businesses set up blogs, has her own at workingsolo.com.au. On sites such as guru.com she has seen the blog designs from eastern Europe and India being sold for a few hundred dollars, she says. In Australia it may cost $500 to $1000 to have a design tailored.
When it comes to scoring hits with search engines, fresh content is important, Maclean says. “Search engines such as Google actually recognise that blogs by their nature are more likely to be dynamic rather than static. So they listen to blogs and their bots follow them more than standard websites.”
Tough says blogs are a good substitute for writing articles for trade magazines, a traditional public relations tactic. Now she posts to her blog instead. It is like having a conversation with people, partly because they can leave comments on each post.
She aims to do at least one or two posts a week, often writing about something that she has seen elsewhere and wants to share or link to. “It’s pretty easy doing it on a once-weekly basis and I’d probably get that done in an hour or less because they are quite short posts,” she says.
The attraction of a blog is that it is flexible and easy to manage and change content for small business owners, Maclean says.
Using WordPress is as easy as writing a document in Microsoft Word, she says. It is her platform of choice, although she also has clients who use the hosted service Typepad.
A blog is also a powerful business networking tool, she says. “Blogs fit into the social networking tools and many will develop global networks with like-minded people.”