Decision paralysis is something that should be avoided at all costs when it comes to business. This is the situation wherein a manager, or any person in a position, finds himself unable to make a decision at a crucial time. This can happen to anyone, anytime, at least once in his life. No one is totally exempt from such an occurrence – even the most competent of managers may find himself paralyzed when faced something of big import.

So what do you do when this happens in the business sense? Perhaps before this can be answered, it would be better to take a look into the reason behind the paralysis. More often than not, decision paralysis arises from the fact that something negative had occurred in the past – a decision gone bad.

The result is understandable, of course, but it is not an excuse to permanently stay in that crippled state. There are things that could be done for the better. Believe it or not, your business blog can help you out when it comes to making decisions and you feel that you are incapable of making them!

Think about it, what is your business blog for? Some reasons may be:

-to get the word out about your company and your products or services
-to communicate with your customers
-get feedback regarding your company and your products or services
-create a network
-others.

What do you need to make decisions? For every situation, there will always be something different but I do believe that one thing that your blog can help you with is information. You can go back to previous posts and comments and garner information that can be very helpful in making your decisions. More so, you can even gain some confidence when you see what you have written in your blog and what your readers have written as well.

In the last post, we talked about how important it is to befriend other bloggers. We talked about the importance of building your own social network of bloggers. For this post, let’s look at some details on how you can achieve this.

Communication
This is important in most any undertaking, but most especially when it comes to building your own social network. Bloggers always welcome comments. When you do get comments, however, do not just sit there and enjoy them. Make sure that you reply to these comments. You can do this in two ways – either e-mail or reply to the comment through the blog. You can even go one step further by writing a post on the comment. The important thing is that you make your readers know that you appreciate and value their comments.

Link, link, link
I am sure you browse other blogs a lot. If you stumble upon a blog that catches your interest and is, at the same, relevant to your own business blog, link! This will encourage to link to your blog as well.

List ‘em down
Actively look for blogs that are relevant to your own business blog. Do this on purpose – aimlessly surfing the Net is not the way to do it. Search for specific topics and then list down the blogs that you want to link up with. Make sure you visit them regularly and be active as well. Post comments, interact with the bloggers, and build relationships.

Who do you think your main readers are? If you answer is your customers, you just might be right. After all, that is your target, is it not? You want to reach out to your customers – both potential and existing – in order for them to know more about your company, your services or your products.

Yet have you thought about reaching out to a specific group – not in terms of whether or not they are customers or not? I am talking about the countless other bloggers – business, corporate, or otherwise.

The fact is that bloggers are one of the biggest groups that patronize other blogs. They know how it is like to maintain and promote a blog. They know what blogs contain and what their general goals are. As such, you should not isolate yourself from other bloggers.

In fact, it would be to the benefit of your blog – and thus your company – to establish relationships with other bloggers out there. This is what is called networking. You may call it what you like but the fact remains that your aim is to connect with other people who have other connections and so on.

This is what blogging is all about – getting the word out on your blog and getting the juice on other people’s blogs as well. If you do not communicate with them, then the chances are that your blog will die out – either slowly or quickly, but the end result is the same.

How do you make – and keep – other bloggers interested? Let’s look at these things in the next post.