A business blog is the anchor to which all your other social media platforms are tied. Its your blog that goes on your Facebook Fan Page and you tweet about. These in turn get passed around by others who in turn come to your website to read that blog. Furthermore when the search engines are aware of the information in your blog, strangers will search for some keywords and find themselves on your business blog. Thats powerful stuff.
As someone who had a professional set up my WordPress blog for me, I never really had to think about the parts of a blog. I just filled in the necessary boxes and hit publish until I began looking around the room. Here are the spaces I found and what they are there for:
- Heading: The heading is the place that carries over the brand design from your website. It probably resembles your business card and stationaryor it should. Your brand needs to look the same everywhere.
- Post: The post is where you write, known as posting. There is a place for your title above the post box. This is your creative space. You can include pictures and videos in this space. These make your content even more interesting.
- Side Bar: This area beside your blog which is created by the widgets set up to do things like show your tweets, pieces of you previous blogs, keywords, calendars, awards and other interesting bits of information.
- Comments: This area is below the blog and contains all the interesting things people have said about your blog. This is the start of two-way interaction that is the real purpose for having a blog in the first place. The number, the comment depth and how people react to your blog are true indications of your engagement with your readers.
- Ways to Share: There are numerous ways that you want to encourage your readers to share your post. New and improved ways to encourage sharing are being developed all the time. I wont give you examples because new ones are going up even as I write. The point is that you want your readers to like your information enough to share it with their Facebook friends, tweet about it on Twitter, add it to their RSS feed, and share it on Google+. The more places they pass your blog on to, the better your SEO ratings and the easier it is for people searching to find you.
Here then is the skeleton of your blog site. It makes more sense once you take a look around.
Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing, helps business owners and business professionals put marketing strategies in place that consistently secure new clients. He can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.799.1238. You can Like him at www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing or connect with him on www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.
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