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Market Smart: How to Gain Customers and Increase Profits with B2B Marketing

relevant to share. If needed, you can retain a copy editor to
help clean up any blogs with rough writing.

Blog Basics

The link to your blog should be prominent on your company’s
website. The best way to encourage views is to host the blog
on your company’s webpage instead of offsite. One of the most
popular blogging platforms, Wordpress, allows you to create a
“blog” directory on your website and host the blog there. Make
sure to include a link to your blog as part of the homepage
navigation, so it’s easy for visitors of your site to find your blog
(and vice versa). This way, people need only search for your
company name and the word “blog” to find you.

Your blog should have a clean and professional design. It’s
perfectly okay to start out using a blog template, but you may
find it more effective to personalize a standardized template to
make it reflect the general design of your website. Customizing
your layout is a good way to ensure brand consistency.

Make sure that it’s easy for people to subscribe to your blog.
The larger your subscriber base, the more your blog becomes
a way to nurture and cultivate potential customers. Distribute
your content on Feedburner.com, and include buttons for
users to share your posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and
Google+.

Find Your Voice

The tone of your blog is important; the most successful
corporate blogs have some personality and don’t sound like
they were produced by a corporation. Your company’s culture
will set the tone of your blog. For most companies, adopting a
casual tone that’s free of jargon is the best option. However, if
your blog is about highly complex and technical topics for an
audience of engineers, stick to a more formal writing style.

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© 2012 Lisa Shepherd