Business Coaching

Everyone’s talking about how blogging can expand a business’ reach further. Most business owners over the age of 35 are skeptical.

Well, it won’t get you instant success, but truth is, a business that consistently updates its own blog with info about the company and issues in its industry are more well-known businesses because of it.

For example, Google has a blog where it writes from time to time about ideas and concepts the site is thinking about unveiling (the latest is something called “Living Stories“), updates to its browser, Google Chrome, complete with screen shots, warnings of scams using Google’s name…the list goes on and on. When you’re as big as Google and have a lot going on, there’s a lot to blog about. Not that they need the SEO rankings, but a blog does help with SEO, and make users’ experience better by providing how-tos and useful information.

Want a lesser known example than Google? Coudal Partners, an advertising agency in Chicago, has a blog on its home page. Some people might wonder why they’d have a blog linking to interesting yet random articles and discussing various issues on the company’s home page. But not only does it make them stand out, fresh content helps their SEO ranking and the variety of creative topics their employees blog about show they get creative inspiration from just about everywhere at any place in the world (a post of theirs links to “Subway Architecture“. Cool stuff. ).

If your business starts its own blog, not only is it a great social media tool that provides networking by way of commenting on other blogs, people commenting on yours and leaving links to your/their blogs, it can also spread the word about your company by doing the following:

Increasing your site’s SEO (if you don’t know what these three letters mean, they stand for “search engine optimization”): SEO is something that is hugely important to businesses. Whenever someone searches an online engine for a keyword relating to your business, you want your business to be at the top of the page. It can be used to gain search engine traffic for given keywords or search terms. Your blog offers the opportunity to promote your Web site for hundreds or even thousands of different keywords.

Search engines particularly like promoting blogs because they offer a large amount of content that is updated and added to on a regular basis.

Easy Access to Company News and Info: However, be careful you don’t blog in press release style – if a blog is all praise for the company, it doesn’t sound genuine. Blog about company news and info that is useful and interesting, just like Coudal Partners and Google. People would always rather read genuine, high-quality content instead of filler information, too.

Expanding your Reach: A blog is a great way to find new potential customers. Write about the niche your business caters to in the market, and anything interesting within that niche, and people looking for anything related to your business could find your blog in a search. Keep in mind that updating information on the blogs and blogging regularly can keep people coming back to your blog for information and could become customers, too. Regular content is imperative to the success of any blog. This content needs to be informative, accurate, and written in a way that will appeal to your visitors.

Creating Fun and Familiarity: Faceless corporate blogs aren’t that fun to read. Why? Besides being dry and boring, they also don’t feel very inviting. Going back to our point about high-quality content, familiarity is very important with content – if the reader can’t relate to it or feels it’s just a higher up writing from a press release, the reader won’t take it to heart. Keep this in mind, and make it work for your company by designating a person (not necessarily the CEO) or a team to do the blogging. If you read Google’s blog, you’ll see that even their posts have a bit of personality to them. It’s easy to do.

All in all, a blog on your company’s site might be worth looking in to – hey, it’s good enough for Google – and it may be the extra piece your company needs to separate it from the competition.

Macy's, national chain, is focusing on individual stores for locally-demanded merchandise.

It’s smart to think local, especially during a recession. So smart that even national chains are thinking locally in order to succeed in their market sectors.

Macy’s is one of the biggest retail chains in America, but due to the recession, changes needed to happen. It might have seemed daunting to try to think local as a national chain, but CEO Terry Lundgren took baby steps into that change, and it looks like it’s paying off.

For starters, he replaced merchandise managers who oversaw product assortments at two dozen stores each with more local managers responsible for half that many outlets. With fewer stores to cover, each manager spent more time figuring out what was selling.

Then they made the necessary changes in certain stores’ inventory. In Chicago, Macy’s started carrying more size 11 shoes. In stores near water parks, they’re stocking more swimsuits.

Thinking locally didn’t start paying off until the fourth quarter in 2008, but it is – slowly but surely – paying off.

Macy’s isn’t the only national chain trying to think locally – Wal-Mart, Tesco and Best Buy are thinking locally in terms of its product offerings, too.

If your business, like Macy’s, is losing money due to economic conditions and resisting change rather than changing, you might want to rethink your strategy. If there’s any way your business can shift focus from national to local, it could mean better business. After all, local businesses have more support from locals for a reason – they cater to them, personally, therefore their products are locally driven and they sell what people need, thus spurring their success.

Even though Macy’s may never be a small, quaint storefront, its business model is smart, and worth a notice from other businesses.