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6 Tips for Customizing Your Small Business Blog

6 Tips for Customizing Your Small Business Blog

Sep 10, 2009 -

If you’re like most socially-savvy companies, your business probably has a blog.  It’s a great way to connect with your customers, announce new products, and provide a human face to your company’s image.  

While writing insightful and informative blog posts is the most important thing to do with a company blog, the design and implementation of your blog is key as well.  The right plugins can help you get discovered on Google, while a cluttered design can turn off potential customers. 

With that said, here are some of my top tips for customizing a small business blog so that it is professional, productive, and easy to discover. 

A Few Key Tips 

1.   Install some top blog plugins: If you are using blog software such as WordPress, then you can add plugins to customize how your blog looks and functions.  While there are tens of thousands of plugins available on multiple platforms, a business blog should focus on search engine optimization (SEO), making the blog load faster, and making it easy for others to share blog posts via email, Twitter, and other social networks.  Check out the WordPress Plugin Directory to see some of the web’s most popular plugins. 

2.   Integrate social media links and buttons: Don’t be afraid to integrate Facebook and Twitter on a business blog.  It’s a standard practice and will help drive new visitors to your blog.  Social media buttons make it easy for customers to tweet out your work, while adding links to the company’s Twitter and YouTube accounts will help bolster their numbers and improve their ranking in search. 

3.   Focus on simple designs, not bells and whistles: The focus of a blog should be on the content, not on widgets or sidebars or flashy designs.  It’s better to have a very simple design template than a complex one if you want to convert readers into customers. 

4.   Do show effort in the design, though: A corporate blog is also a chance to show off a human element of the company and to be creative.  Just using the standard template is usually lazy and most readers will know it.  Don’t be afraid to experiment. 

5.   Have your blog on your own web domain: Most companies have their blogs at blog.companyurl.com.  It’s generally considered unprofessional for a company to have a blog hosted on WordPress.com or Typepad.com, so always have your blog somewhere on your company’s website. 

6.   Don’t hide your “about” information: Assume that your average reader has never heard about your company.  If you have that in mind, you want to be sure they can quickly find out more about you.  Either have a paragraph at the top or on the side describing the company, or make the “About” page very prominent. 

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Franck-Boston
 

Tags: ben parr, blog, design, mashable, social media

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Article Comments (4)

  • King

    (Sep 10, 2009)
    Ben, Thank you so much for your insights. I am always trying to keep my blog clean, but fresh. I have a Typepad blog, and Typepad just keeps getting and better. Do you know of anyone who does Typepad plug-ins? If not, why don't YOU start putting some together. MMM The Franchise King, Joel Libava The Franchise King Blog

  • CEO

    (Sep 10, 2009)
    Good advice Ben, I couldn't agree more. Joel - typepad.com has a bunch of plugins available on their site. I used to use Typepad (and LOVED it like you do) but recently switched to Wordpress to do what Ben advised - bring it into our domain so all that rich content becomes indexed by Google to drive a higher SEO ranking. I recently recruited Wordpress experts on CraigsList for $20/hour and was flooded with 200 responses, so it's pretty inexpensive to find someone to do it - I also have a great guy I use but he's a bit more money but could knock this off for you no sweat.

  • King

    (Sep 10, 2009)
    Hi paul, Yes, Typead has a few plug-ins, but not like WP. Having said that, I am very comfortable with Typepad, plus I really like the folks there. I met them last year at Blogworld. I do have a Typepad expert that helps with with some of the fancy stuff... JL

  • Editor

    (Sep 11, 2009)
    Typepad is a great blog software. Clean and simple to use. It's all about personal preference in the end.

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