What’s the point of a business blog?

My old chum Bruce has recently quit his job as a network manager work as a freelance IT consultant. He’s got loads of experience and will do well.

A few days ago we were discussing his business website (not live yet - I’ll post a link when it is) and he mentioned that he would be including a blog.

This got me thinking about why blogs are becoming so popular on business websites, especially in the freelance and microbusiness sectors. If you read the relevant threads on UKBF you’ll find a number of good reasons put forward for having a blog on your website. It allows you to:

1. Talk about your product and/or service;

2. Issue news, warnings, information updates and product announcements;

3. Prove your expertise by including tutorials and howtos;

4. Offer a simple, easily managed, moderated forum for customer questions and feedback.

For me, there’s a fifth reason, too: a blog humanizes your business.

I recommend my clients have a blog on their sites for the same reason that I recommend that they include photos and bios of their key people. Visitors to a site like to see the people behind the pages - it gives them a sense of what makes the business tick. That, in turn, builds trust. Trust is the route to winning both new customers and repeat business.

That being the case, what subjects should you blog about? The classic advice is to provide useful information that gives targeted readers a direct benefit. That’s an absolutely sound strategy, but don’t forget to include what journalists call the human angle - talk about yourself, the projects you’ve been working on, and what you hope to achieve in future.

Including that human angle helps new visitors warm to you and your business, and makes it harder for them to write you off or criticise aspects of your offering or your site. Some still will, of course, but for most people it’s much easier to be sympathetic to a business once they know a bit about the hopes and aspirations of the human beings behind it.