To a lot of people, blogging is a scary concept.

Why would I blog? What would I write about? Who would read it? Will it even help my business?

Let’s think about it in terms of something everyone in the business world understands- applying for jobs.

You know how on resumes, you have one page to show how great you are? And you think, “How can I fit it all on one page?”

You know how you hope and pray for that chance of a face-to-face interview so you can prove to that potential employer that you are potential employee material? To prove how much you know? To elaborate on those two-line descriptions on your one-page resume?

Well, a blog is just like that interview.

Your company website might show all your products and services. It might have sections dedicated to telling your history, focusing on your mission, or sharing your contact information. Your website might even show a little bit of your personality or company culture. But there is no better way to showcase your real knowledge and expertise than with a blog.

Earn Some Street Cred

A lot of companies use their blogs as a public relations tool, putting up posts about what’s going on within their company. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, writing about yourself is a great way to showcase your talent and expertise, but you should also spend some time writing about your industry.

Ask questions. Have an opinion. Show off a little bit.

Use your company blog to gain credibility within your own industry. When it comes to blogging and social media, it isn’t always about competition. It is about sharing information and learning from others.

Don’t buy it? Well, numbers don’t lie. Here are some hard facts from Technorati’s 2009 state of the blogosphere:

• 71% of all respondents who maintain blogs for a business report that, through their writing, they have increased visibility within their industries
• 58% say they they are better known in their industry thanks to their blog
• 56% say that their blog has helped their company establish positioning as a thought leader within their industry

Not bad, huh? Who wouldn’t want to be considered a leader in their industry? And here’s a bonus- the respect you earn within your industry is only going to attract more customers.

Showing Off to Customers

Chances are most of your customers have been to your website. And you know what? I bet most of your potential customers have probably visited your website too. Why not give them more to look at?

The nice thing about a blog is that it gives you unlimited space to promote your company. You can use your blog to write about new happenings within your company, provide more information on products or services, or as we said before, provide some insight on your industry.

No matter what you decide to write about, you have the freedom to post about anything and everything that makes you look good. It’s a great way to remind current customers how great you are and to convince potential customers to bring business your way.

Wondering how your blog can attract new business? In Why Blogging is Good for Business, we gave the example of someone looking for assistance in health care billing. If your company has an expertise in that area, and you repeatedly write about it on your blog, the reader will be inspired to seek you out. How’s that for ROI?

Just Think About It

How often do you get to set time aside to think? We spend so much time focusing on the client (as we should), that sometimes it can be hard to stop and think about ourselves.

Writing makes you think. It makes you think about your industry, your company, your practices, your opinions (and some of the time, it even involves research). Even though you’re goal is to educate others, you’ll probably learn something along the way too.

Now, isn’t that nice?
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We know blogging can be scary for some people, but here’s our question for you-

Would you have gotten your job based on that one-page resume alone? Or was it that face-to-face interview?

Danielle Hohmeier writes about marketing and design in the digital world for Atomicdust, with a focus on marketing convergence and social media.

We are a little late on making New Year’s resolutions (in fact, this is about the time of year that most people are breaking theirs), but we wanted to give you guys an idea of where we see this blog heading in the future. Go ahead and bookmark this blog right now because we’ve come up with a list of topics that can help your member-based service succeed.

Blogging for Business

You’ve already been introduced to this topic in our aptly titled post, Why Blogging is Good for Business, and we promised we would elaborate more. Keep an eye out for posts about how blogs can help you establish expertise and credibility, improve your SEO, build strong relationships with current and potential clients, and reach your audience through social media. (February)

Social Media

It’s the biggest buzzword of the last year, but what is it really? And how can it help keep subscribers and get new customers? (March)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

For the Internet to be a useful marketing tool, people have to be able to find you. Search Engine Marketing makes that possible, whether it be through paid inclusion on search engines, online advertising, or SEO. (April)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Don’t have a ton of spare change lying around to buy up ads? No worries. Your website can still get noticed. (May)

Microsite

No, this is not a tiny version of your website. A microsite is specifically designed to call attention to a particular product, service or campaign. (June)

User Interface

Clients have to be able to use your website. We’ll show you ways to make a website that works for your customers, and not the other way around. (July)

Video

Sure, online video is great for clips of kittens, babies, and Lost fan videos, but it can also help your member-based service educate current clients and attract new ones. (August)

Design & Process

Don’t be fooled. Looks do matter. (September)

Email Marketing

People get a lot of emails. And people delete a lot of emails. The trick is keeping yours out of that trash bin. (October)

Direct Mail

Sometimes you have to get off the Internet to get people on it. Direct mail can be a great way to drive potential clients to your website. (November)

Collateral

Finish this sentence: “It takes a village…” To promote a product? To launch a campaign? There is more to the marketing plan than just a website. We’ll help you figure out how to make collateral marketing materials work for your company. (December)

We’re looking forward to writing more in depth about all of these topics and exploring how you can use each of them to increase your market share in 2010. Can’t wait until December to find out how to effectively use collateral? Give us a call.

Last month I wrote about Blogging for Business and how it helps promote your marketing message. I was flipping through the February issue of Physicians Practice and came across this: Are You Saying to Much Online?

While we advocate blogging for our healthcare clients it’s important to keep patient confidentiality in mind. The Physicians Practice article has a few tips:

Read it over. Before you hit the “publish” or “share” key to display your thoughts to the Internet world, review what you’ve written. Make sure there are no identifying details or information that patients or colleagues might take issue with, says healthcare attorney Steven Kern. Remember that what might seem funny or harmless to you may offend others. “If you think for a second that what you are writing could be misconstrued, take your [fingers] off the keyboard,” Kern says.

Consultant Kenneth Hertz says physicians should take a page from a carpenter’s book. Where they measure twice and cut once, so should the doc read twice and hit send once.

Keep separate profiles. If you publish a social networking profile or broadcast bits on Twitter, keep your professional persona separate from your personal one. As a physician, you should maintain a professional boundary with your patients, Kern says. “As soon as you start mixing friendship or the social or the comfortable zone with the professional zone, I think you can run into some problems,” he says. So don’t post your family’s Disneyland vacation photos to your professional Facebook page.

Look beyond HIPAA. All-out privacy violations such as listing a patient’s name, age, or address are likely rare, but plenty of forays into the cybernetworking world may be inappropriate without being technical HIPAA violations. “Physicians really have an obligation to go well beyond what HIPAA mandates,” says Vartabedian. More subtle ethical violations are far more common — and perhaps just as dangerous.

Follow other bloggers. If you’re considering broadcasting your thoughts online via a blog, first spend a couple weeks reading other medical bloggers, says Vartabedian. Following your trusted and more experienced peers is a good way to learn the optimal topics and the boundaries. “Looking and listening is one of the best things you can do to learn the standards,” Vartabedian says.

Blend cases. If you feel compelled to wax clinical, you should take great pains to fictionalize the case, or blend several cases to ensure one is not identifiable. Perhaps present a story representative of the case or problem you had, Jones says.

Consider a policy. Larger practices should consider a policy outlining what physicians and staff can and cannot communicate online and what media they can use without prior authorization, says Kern. Practices may even need policies for social networking pages. “I think that is an area ripe for all kinds of problems, even if it’s a private access site,” he says.

Use your common sense. “If you wouldn’t say it on an elevator, don’t say it on your blog,” Jones says. Remember, nothing is private anymore, and everything you type — everything— can wind up going viral. “Write as if everything you type can be on CNN, because if it’s anything controversial, it will be.”

While most of these tips apply to Doctors publishing in blogs about their practices some of them apply to larger company sites as well. Use your best judgment when posting and keep HIPPA laws in mind.

Check out the entire article, Are You Saying to Much Online, on the Physicians Practice website for more information.

When I started outlining this post, I realized there were actually quite a few good reasons to blog for your business. So many, in fact, it would be overwhelming to include them all in a single post. I decided instead to present an abridged overview on each point, and then follow up on those points in detail in future posts.

While I don’t believe any of the information is superfluous, one purpose of blogging is to generate interest and create a following. Think of this post as a summary; a tool to spark your interest. Successive posts promise to explore each topic with more detailed information and thus, you, the reader, will be motivated to come back. Are my motives selfish? Perhaps. But hopefully I have taught you an important lesson in blogging- you’ve got to get your readers to come back for more.

As a quick primer, I’ll refer to Wikipedia’s definition of a blog.

“A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”)[1] is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”

Now, let’s get on to why ‘regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other materials’ will help you in achieving your business goals.

Establish Expertise and Credibility

Blogging helps you gain expertise in your industry and adds credibility to your business. When you write a post on a topic your company deals with, it not only helps you learn more about the topic, but it also illustrates your knowledge to current and potential clients. Readers gain a deeper understanding of what it is you do and how it can potentially help them in their business endeavors.

For example, if someone is looking for assistance with health care billing and your blog contains fifteen different posts about your company’s experience in that field, the reader will be inspired to seek you out and assist in the buying process.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engines love content, especially when that content is fresh, on topic, and easy for them to find and index.

Blogging allows your business to constantly feed search engines information about your business. Let’s say you wrote three articles with titles such as ‘Health Care Billing Best Practices,’ ‘Health Care Billing for Small Practices’ and ‘Making Health Care Billing Easy.’ You then would have three potential search results for the key phrase ‘health care billing.’ Each new blog post becomes a potential search result and gets potential customers to your website.

Another SEO advantage is that most blogging software automatically creates XML site maps and pings the search engines when new content is generated. An XML site map has the page title, permalink, and publish date. This gets fed directly into the search engines and they send what’s known as a spider to read and index your page.

So when you publish your ‘Health Care Billing Best Practices’ post, your blog software updates the site map and sends a ping to the search engines notifying them of new content. They download your site map, find your URLs and page titles, crawl the page, and add your blog post to the index. All of this happens in about an hour for popular, well established blogs.

Rapport with Clients and Potential Customers

At Atomicdust, we work with a wide range of companies that provide their clients with member-based services. These companies are always looking for ways to foster strong relationships with their customers. Blogging allows you to establish and maintain rapport with both existing and potential customers.

Nowadays, it is easy to become just a phone number, an email address, or a business card. Blogging gives your company personality, or puts a ‘face’ on your brand. The trick here is to connect with your readers. You are already generating content that is important to them, but you also need to convey a tone that is relatable. Customers not only want to like your work, they want to like you.

Blogging gives you another opportunity to shine a light on your company and all that it has to offer.

Let’s assume that one of your current customers is searching for information on a new health care billing company because they are unsure if the service you’re currently offering is fulfilling their business needs. This search lands them back on your website where they find your blog. If your blog properly showcases your services and expertise, the customer will find yet another reason to stay with your company.

Blogging is another vessel to further showcase your talent and personality. It gives current and potential clients a clear picture of your company’s knowledge and reinforces their decision to stay with you or begin a relationship.

Social Media

Social media is the new marketing buzzword. It’s a complex topic, but the basis is simple- social media is the sharing of information and receiving feedback on that information.

A blog allows you to easily push your information through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other outlets. When someone reads your new post, they tweet it to their followers who in turn end up on your site and then retweet the information to their followers.

A single tweet has the potential to reach thousands of readers, but reaching the right ones are important. Since most people are fairly cliquish, they usually have folllowers with similar interests and needs to their own. It’s a good bet that the person who reads your health care post has peers who would also benefit from reading it.

If you can target influential readers, entice them with your posts, and get them to send out  your link in social media channels, you have successfully reached a new group of potential customers.

We’ve established four reasons blogging is good for your business- expertise, SEO, rapport, and social media. In future posts, I will explore each of these topics in more detail. So, bookmark this page, tweet it to your followers, and add our RSS feed to your reader so you can come back for more insights. If you’re already convinced that blogging can help your business, give us a call and we’ll see if we’re a good fit for helping your business achieve its online marketing goals.

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum but we thought that it made sense to repost it here.

Business blogging can be exceptionally rewarding. When done correctly, a successful blog can bring attention to your business, can attract new customers, and can turn your current customer base into the type of fans that companies like Apple, Netflix, and Ben and Jerry’s have: people who will not only buy your product or service, but evangelize it to their peers. Of course, like anything, there is a right way to go about starting a business blog and a wrong way.

Creating a blog for your small business isn’t easy; it requires hard work and the ability to think creatively about your work. But if you avoid the five big mistakes laid out in this post, your chances of building a successful business blog will be much better.

Mistake #1: Treating Your Blog Like a Press Center

The number one mistake that business bloggers make is to treat their blog as an extension of their current press center. Repeat after me: Your blog is not the place for press releases. Blogging is a conversation and it offers a way for your customers to connect with your business on a completely new level. Press releases, on the other hand, are the exact opposite. They’re impersonal, they’re self promotional, and most readers don’t trust them. If you use your blog to republish press releases your customers will have no reason to keep reading and they’ll also likely not trust your content.

How to Avoid: First, don’t ever put out a press release on your blog. You can use your blog to make product or other business announcements, but do so with original writing and in a more casual voice. Second, do use your blog to write about things other than your core business. Share your thoughts on your industry, share insights into the day-to-day work life and processes at your company, and provide tips and tricks you have learned during your time in business.

Mistake #2: Not Blogging Regularly

Think about the blogs you read on a regular basis — how many of them publish only sporadically? Most successful blogs put out new content at least a couple of times per week and try to stick to a regular schedule. Consistently putting out quality content will keep readers returning and over time it will help you build a community and turn your customers into fans.

How to Avoid: Blogging regularly isn’t easy, so to avoid burning out, brainstorm editorial ideas ahead of time. If you plan to put out new posts every Tuesday and Friday, for example, try not to start writing Tuesday’s post on Tuesday morning. Get other people at your company involved so that one person isn’t shouldering the entire blogging load, and even consider sourcing content from your customers. Remember that anything can provide fodder for a good blog post, so pay attention to the things you read or see on other blogs, newspapers, magazines, or television.

Mistake #3: Not Enabling Conversation

As I already said, blogging is a conversation, and not allowing it to occur on your blog is a mistake. It’s true that blog comments can open you up to criticism, but blogging is an unparalleled opportunity to connect with your customers. You’ll get a lot more out of blogging if you enable — and even encourage — your customers to respond to what you write.

How to Avoid: Obviously the first thing you need to do is enable commenting on your business blog. But beyond that, you need to remember that the conversation is two-way. Get in there and respond to the comments readers leave on your blog and you’ll be more likely to develop a community around your writing that can help turn your customers into fans who will evangelize your products and services and provide you with quality feedback. You should also participate in the conversation on other blogs in your industry by leaving comments on posts elsewhere around the blogosphere. That will help you to establish your “blogging brand” and bring new readers your way.

Mistake #4: Making New Content Hard to Discover

Your blog won’t be very helpful to readers if they aren’t able to easily find new content. You need to make your blog discoverable and you need to make sure that when you add new content, your regular readers will be able to find it.

How to Avoid: There are a few ways to make sure your blog content is more easily discovered.

• Make your blog easy to find by linking to it prominently from your company’s web site and including your blog’s URL in your email signature, on your business cards, and in sales and marketing collateral.
• Use a full RSS feed (because the goal with most business blogs should be to get read, not boost page views) and make it easy for your readers to find and subscribe to.
• Embrace social media technologies like Twitter and Facebook as a way to notify your fans and followers of new blog content, and make it easy for your readers to share content with each other through social media channels and via email.
• Optimize for search engines by putting relevant keywords in post titles and URL slugs and write about the things that your customers are most likely to be searching for — but avoid sounding artificial simply so you can stuff some more keywords into a post.

Mistake #5: Expecting Too Much, Too Soon

Blogging isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. Your blog won’t be an overnight success, and for the first few months it might feel like you’re writing for no one. It can take time to build up your readership and have a regular community of people who participate on your blog. Don’t expect immediate returns from your blog and do expect to put in a lot of hard work.

How to Avoid: Set attainable goals and realize that you’re in it for the long haul. Don’t cancel your blogging efforts after three months — give it at least a year of regularly putting out quality, original content. And make sure that your blog is easy to find, and that your readers are able to easily comment and share posts with others.