Business and Blogging

Your Business Blog Does Not Have to be About Your Business

by Des Walsh on October 9th, 2006

One of the things that seems to hold some business owners back from blogging is a fear that they won’t be able to sustain a flow of content about their business.

Or they are concerned that if they write a lot about their business, in the sense of writing about their own company, they will be giving away their valuable intellectual property.

But there is no rule that your blog has to be about your company. In fact, there could be circumstances in which you make a sensible business decision to have a blog which is not focused on your company, in terms of the individual posts.

And I sometimes need to remind business owners that they are likely to have a lot of information about their industry, or at least they have opinions about the industry, what’s good about it, what’s not so good, how it could be better. Which can provide plenty of content.

And by writing about your industry rather than just about your own part in it, you can avoid stress about the risk of giving away your ‘trade secrets’ or revealing market-sensitive information about your own company’s internal concerns.

An example of a blog which provides draws on a range industry information and news is Practical Blogging, where author Robyn Tippins shares a huge amount of information, in a very readable way, without ‘giving away the farm’.

With this sort of approach, as a blog owner you can position yourself as a thought leader in your industry sector. One benefit of that could be to make you more easily findable on Google or other search engines.

You can still intersperse your posts about industry issues and news with posts about your own products. Or you might choose to ‘ponder aloud’ about what kind or variation of products people might like to have, which could in turn provide you with valuable feedback from the market.

The key point to remember, for people who worry about ‘saying too much’ is that, just because you are being more open and interactive with the market, you don’t have to tell all. In fact, a good rule of thumb is not to blog about anything if you would not want to see your post on the front page of your daily newspaper the next day!

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POSTED IN: Corporate, General, Small Business