Of the top 500 companies in the USA, a third still do not have a company blog. The reasons for this isn’t clear. I’m guessing that the marketing agencies they use, or their in house marketing teams or departments, don’t have enough knowledge of Internet marketing to truly comprehend the value of a company blog from a PR, branding and direct sales perspective.

According to Bill Gates a company blog provides opportunities for companies to establish opinion and thought, whilst creating a “human face” to an organization.

Speaking with a blog consultant may help to explain the true ROI that can be gained through effective blog management and implementation; a company blog is an effective SEM (search engine marketing) tool that establishes authority and provides direct sales conversions.

With the rise in social blogging and social media in general, the commercial sector is set to follow, with companies such as Microsoft already realizing and experiencing the benefits of a company blog. They are able to respond to news as and when it happens, they are able to attain feedback on products, and they have also created a sales platform that speaks with millions of highly targeted customers.

With blog and social media consulting services, search marketing agencies and SEO (search engine optimization) firms, the future of commercial blogging will be less about public relations and far more about link building and SEO. Many companies are finding that a company blog, like their website, is another sales tool available to help them break into markets that their existing marketing efforts have yet to focus on, or that the company wishes to test before investing in a marketing campaign.

How to gain clients using a blog…

A firm assigns someone to research and implement a plan to establish or enhance the company’s online presence. He or she approaches a website design company and commissions a website design or hire someone to build a website in house. After two months online upper management is disappointed to discover that the website attains virtually zero visitors, let alone conversions of traffic to sales. Attention is then directed towards finding a specialist in online marketing to consult and find out how the company’s website can rank higher in the search engines.

Let’s say you have an online marketing consultancy, and that your company blog provides basic information about search engine optimization, search engine marketing, branding, social media marketing, etc. The person handling the website project for the company gains some knowledge of what he or she needs to do, but more importantly, a connection with a prospective client is established, and that potential client realizes that your firm is capable of handling all that is needed to resolve the problem with the firm’s website.

What a blog consultant can do for you…

Through speaking with a blog consultant it’s possible to gain an idea as to the results you can expect to attain from a company blog, as well as what blog management services are available. A competent blog consulting service should be able to penetrate competitive online markets through improved search engine ranking, listings of client’s blogs in blog directories, establishing back links, use of social media, press releases and other methods used to create awareness of an online presence.

Company blogging amongst small and medium size businesses has increased over the past few years, with many firms opting to maintain more than one blog based on the results they attained. Through spreading a message across multiple blogs they are able to represent different perspectives of their business and focus on keyword phrases that are more targeted than may be practical using on a more general company blog or website. Companies new to blogging are therefore entering a market place in which their competition may be the dominant player, regardless of the competitor’s physical size or market share. To compete, it’s recommended new players in the online market seek out a consultancy to help them map out a strategy from conception, through launch and online promotion to quickly, and cost effectively, gain the market awareness they seek.

Some additional points to ponder…

As link building becomes a more exhaustive and costly task, blogging is an area of the web where savy webmasters show a more kind-hearted approach to providing back links. Locating amicable bloggers however is a time consuming task. Firms experiences in blogging, social media marketing, and web marketing in general, who offer consultancy already have the contacts to quickly and effectively establish the back links necessary to earn their clients a high page rank, and thus a better placement within search engine results.

A blog can be positioned within a company’s primary domain name or use a stand alone domain name, meaning that any residual page rank can be distributed to the sales page from highly content-relevant material. For example, a firm may have a catchy name like Can Look Up Inc.. The company website is www.canlookup.com, which is easy to remember and spell, but says virtually nothing about what the company’s product or service is. Can Look Up is a Canadian web directory, and functions as an online marketing media selling advertising. To generate business, Can Look Up Inc. depends on using prime keyword domains to earn enhanced page rank via an SEO basic; every page on the website has a unique title that is descriptive of the content.