WordPress Guide for Business Bloggers

The basics from a technical standpoint are:

• Set the WordPress account up
• Establish a home page and a posting page
• Format the home page for immediate customer recognition and trust using business branding and mission statements
• Pay attention to business needs such as guarding resources like customer information and software security via only using trusted sources for plug-ins
• Plan for having backup and recovery options for databases and server needs
• Incorporate basic business precepts necessary to marketing to a target audience regardless of offline or online presence

The final, and most important, step in perfecting the online process of business blogging is for the business to provide something of value for the customer to read. Providing something valuable to a consumer means identifying the customer target or market demographic that the business hopes to attract and studying their wants, needs, desires and habits.

A blog should have a defined purpose. Some blogs might be used to present important information related to technical points such as safety issues, recalls and clarification of future research and development. Some blogs might be used to persuade customers to come to the business for needs. Some blogs might be used to entertain the reader, such as a company blog shared among employees. And other blogs might be used to allow for the business to create articles which will give them representation in online search engines so that they can generate traffic via keywords to company products.

The Internet is a fast fluid medium. Change happens fast and the attention span of the Internet surfer is often fleeter than even the change occurring across the web. The modern consumer used to using the Internet is bombarded with all sorts of information which requires filtering to locate what the consumer wants to see.

The message of an effective blog needs to be concise and draw the reader's interest quickly, so that the reader stays on the page to consume the message and internalize it. If the message moved the customer's thought process successfully in the same direction as the business' intent in creating the blog, the consumer's next step should be to take an action. This process happens in seconds, sometimes less than a second depending on the speed of the reader's thought process.

In the creation of a business blog, which is competing with all the other blogs out there including non-business related casual writers, the business needs to develop the posted writing with particular attention to baiting the hook correctly. This goes back to the rule that a successful business knows its target audience.

People who fish do not go out on the water with the intent to catch one fish while using the bait for another. The hook is baited with the most appealing item to the desired fish. A business should think of the Internet like an ocean with millions of fish and many different types. The blog is the business' hook, the content of the blog is the bait.

Before making that first post on the blog, do some market research. Try to avoid duplicating something someone else has already done. If another blog is already on the Internet which says something identical to a business' message, chances are that the first blog has had time to garner reviews, clicks and traffic. This blog will show up first in search engines designed to showcase the most popular searches and results.

If a blog is designed to increase traffic to another portion of the business' online presence or a local store premise, then keyword stuffing in the blog might be a good tactic. However, be careful not to overdo keyword stuffing as sometimes a blog will come off as less than fluid, boring, illogical and unnatural.

Time is a finite resource. Time means money for most businesses. People are not paid to read business blogs but their time is also equally valuable because it cannot be gotten back after spent reading a message the reader felt to be a waste of time and space. Blogs should provide something of value to the customer to leave a positive or thought provoking reaction.

There is no one guide specific to what content to put into a blog or how to present it as variables differ between the types of businesses and organizations who wish to blog. Invest time in knowing your customer and the customer's needs and then offer blogs which appeal to those needs and engage the customer's interest further.