We’ve come to the end of this series about the Four Ps of Effective Business Blogging, as Tom Pick has explained. To recap the first three, they are Personality, Persistence, and Passion. The last of the bunch is something more measurable and quite practical – Promotion.

With every business venture, promotion is one of the most important activities. To realize how important promotion is, it is necessary to go back to the core goal of the business activity. For blogging, why are you in the blogging business? Or rather, why are you maintaining a blog for your business?

The answer is simple – you want to reach out to the countless people out there who could be potential readers. For business blogs, you want to extend your business’s reach and let the whole world know that you exist and inform them of what you have to offer. The main role of a blog is to achieve this goal and the main way by which you can do this with your business blog is to promote the blog.

There are many ways by which you can promote your blog – SEO practices, making use of social networking sites, exchanging links with other blogs and sites, and so on. All these do not happen by themselves, you need to exert some effort in order to make your blog known to the world.

This is perhaps the million dollar question when it comes to businesses and blogging. We have to admit, one of the biggest reasons companies enter the world of blogging is to find new customers. This can be done in various ways. A business can set up its own blog. Alternatively, a business can get other bloggers to write about their product or service. In both cases, the aim is the same – to get the word out about something that the business is selling. Yet are the results going to be the same for both approaches?

I got the inspiration for this post when I read Tim Parry’s post “Can a Blog Really Increase Leads?” He illustrates an example:

I think that this approach can indeed generate tons of leads. Yet as Parry said so himself, how many of the leads are going to be qualified? How many of them would actually be converted into sales? We really cannot tell. Yet I think that it could work. What about you?

Not convinced yet? Well here are more reasons you should work on improving your business’s online presence.

Gather feedback conveniently
Feedback from customers is one of the most important things in running a business. How would you know if you are satisfying your customers or if there are some aspects that you need to work on? One of the most effective ways of achieving this is to hear directly from the users of your product or service. Having a web site or a blog wherein customers can directly voice out their opinions – whether positive or negative is a cost effective way of doing this.

Make extra income
Maintaining a web site or a blog is not all expenditure on your part. In fact, business models have been changing a lot in the past years because of the Internet. You can even earn extra money through your web site or blog through affiliate marketing and ads. Of course, you have to do this right in order to avoid senseless ads that might only annoy your customers.

Educate your customers
An important thing regarding advertising and marketing is the dissemination of accurate information – both to existing and potential clients. Your web site or blog is an effective way of doing this. You can upload all the relevant information to your blog and have it there for the whole world to read.

Again, all these things can be done with much less cost than traditional methods.

Here are some more compelling reasons to improve your online presence.

Save money on printing and distribution costs.
If you are operating “offline,” the chances are that you spend a considerable sum on printing and distribution costs. This is because the traditional method of marketing involves paper and then physical distribution – either through post or manual distribution. Either way, you have to shell out money to get the job done. This happens with each issue of a newsletter or a flyer.

When you decide to maintain a web site or a blog, though, you would considerably lessen these costs. How so? Of course, you would have to spend some money on the setting up of the site as well as the maintenance. The cost is much lower than the traditional method, though. With a blog, you need only to post entries and make use of the existing technology to distribute your new entries without having to spend a lot.

Get wider exposure for less cost.
Information on the Internet is available to anyone anywhere in the world. Think of your blog as a “free” means of getting the publicity that you need and want. All you need to do is work on your blog and make sure that you reach as many people as you want to. This means crossing physical boundaries – the potential is limitless!

Operate 24/7.
Business hours offer limitations but they are necessary. You can open a hotline which customers can reach 24 hours a day, 7 days a week but the costs may be beyond your reach. With a web site or a blog, however, customers can seek the information they need anytime they need it.

One of the biggest reasons – if not THE biggest – business blogging is important is to improve your presence online. Have you ever really spent much thought on why this is important, though? If your business is thriving and you are making a good profit, is there really a need to go online and make your presence felt there? Why not just stick to what you have at present and make the most out of it?

Here are some reasons you should improve your business presence online.

People look to web sites as a plus point when it comes to credibility and accessibility.
With the use of the Internet being as prevalent as it is today, people see web sites as more than things to visit online. They actually attribute more credibility to businesses when they can find them online. More so, they appreciate the fact that web sites are easy to visit and provide them with the information that they need conveniently, any time that they want to.

Online shopping as an activity has greatly increased in the past years.
If your business is selling a product, or products, then you would be one to greatly benefit from the use of the Internet as a shopping medium. You should make the most out of this relatively new venue and market your company to the countless people who go online to do their shopping. Imagine the additional revenue that you could get if you could establish yourself online!

I came across this article on The Daily Herald today which caught my interest as its title was “Blogging is good business – if you have something to say.” Indeed, I was thinking to myself, this is so true. There are so many blogs out there – business and otherwise – that do not really seem to have something to say. There is no central theme or idea to the whole blog and this somehow takes away from the essence of the blog. This topic is somehow related to the last post – being focused when it comes to the theme of your business blog.

The columnist, Jim Kendall points out that the blogging fervor has somewhat died down these days. I would beg to disagree as it seems that more and more people are getting into blogging. However, it might be more accurate to state that the focus seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way.

Business blogs are more specific in their nature and objectives than personal blogs. That is why it is important that you, as a business blogger, determine what you want to convey to your readers; readers who might be existing customers or potential customers. The obvious point here is that if you run a business, your blog will be about your products or services.

However, there are probably countless other business blogs out there who are dealing with the same topic. So why should readers choose your blog over their blogs? Here is where your innovativeness comes in. You should be able to offer more – in different aspects. Your products and services should be cutting edge. More than this, you have to share your own insights – this is what will truly set you apart from other similar business blogs. In the end, if you have something to say, there will always be people who will want to read it.

Here are more practical tips to help you maintain focus within your business blog.

Write with passion.
This comes easily if you are truly passionate about your business and its products or services. I would assume that you are in this business because you are indeed passionate about it. Not everyone is talented when it comes to writing but real passion can be read and felt. More than the passion, however, you should write about something that will be of interest to your targeted audience. That is why you don’t just write down random posts in your business blog. You think about the ideas and then work on the posts.

Don’t be afraid to link and reference to other sources of information.
Some people think that they should not do this as it promotes their possible competitors. It’s hogwash, really. You cannot expect people to take you as the authority in your field just like that. You need to be able to establish your authority first. You have to be able to demonstrate that you are giving relevant and accurate information. By providing links and references, you are showing that you are confident of your information. More so, link to your own work as well. This will give the readers a view of everything else that you have to offer and further establish your credibility as well.

Promotion and marketing are a must!
Promotion and marketing of your blog, that is. For existing readers, you do not really need to do this but for those people who are not aware of your blog yet – and there should be a lot of them – you should help them find your blog.

Small or home-based businesses face the seemingly insurmountable problem of getting the word out there. Though they may offer a good product or service, if no one knows about them, their business is not going to grow the way they want to. Are you facing this kind of issue in your small or home-based business?

I know that you have probably heard that one of the best ways to advertise is to build a web site. These days, having an online presence is a must if you want to get ahead in the game. Having a site wherein people can find out more about you and your products from the comforts of their homes or offices is on of the most effective ways of advertising.

Yet have you ever thought that you could actually use your business blog as your web site? If you don’t have a web site for your business yet, you could start a blog for the business and generate traffic and potential customers as well.

Blogging is a cost effective way of communicating to the world what your business has to offer. Think about these advantages:

-You can start with a free blog hosting platform.
-You don’t have to know HTML and those things with most blogging platforms.
-Blogs are (generally) search engine friendly.
-Readers cum customers will find your business blog more informative and interactive with comments and responses from you.

You don’t have to start big and spend money on a hi-tech web site. Start simple and reap huge rewards with a business blog as your web site.

If you are new to blogging, then you may be wondering what this post is all about. If you aren’t, then I am sure you have a pretty good idea about what I am going to talk about. For the benefit of those who are not familiar with the term, a blogroll is merely a list of other blogs which you post on your on blog.

So if you are browsing through a specific blog and you see a long list of links to other blogs on one side, you are actually looking at the blogroll. This is one way of letting your readers know that you are recommending the blogs on your blogroll to them. In the same way, if the link to your blog appears in other blogs, you have a form of free advertisement.

With that said, you should pretty much get what I am saying at – blogrolling is good. At the risk of being repetitive, using blogrolls means that you are promoting someone else’s blog and at the same time, your blog is being promoted by others. Seeing it from a business point of view, being in other blogs’ blogroll will enhance your presence on the web.

Imagine if your readers like your blog that much and they link to your business blog in their own sites and blogs? That means higher incoming links and that in turns translates to being in good terms with search engines. In addition to the human factor – people actually seeing your link in other sites – being in the first few pages of a search result is what you are looking for.

So if I were you, I’d get into blogrolling now.

Who isn’t interested in knowing something about the future? That is why we have fortune tellers and all sorts of schemes to give us a peek into what tomorrow holds for us. Why not let this tiny aspect of human nature do your work for you and your business?

Give your customers a peek into what you have in store for them in the near future by posting entries in your blog.

Remember when Sony was still working on the PlayStation 3 and all they had were little snippets of information? How about Steve Jobs and Apple with the iPhone? These two giants in the tech industry know how to build up the anticipation for their products. They know how to give just enough information to their customers and heighten their excitement for what is to come.

You can do exactly the same thing with your business blog.

Make a big deal about a product or service that you are about to release in the near future. Give your customers an idea of what it is about but keep some details hidden – for now. You can even throw in a teaser or two to keep them guessing. Of course, you have to be accurate and honest – you don’t want to be accused of false advertising.

You may not have as big a customer base as Sony and Apple but it doesn’t matter. With such a strategy employed, your blog readers will certainly get the word around. It will only be a matter of time till you get more of the exposure that you are aiming for.