Many businesses, large and small, are setting up corporate blogs (or business blogs). Corporate blogging is still relatively new as a marketing, PR, and business communication tool. Is corporate blogging right for your business? Consider some of these benefits of corporate blogging when deciding to blog or not to blog “officially” through your company.

• Corporate blogs are a way to disseminate important and timely information to your visitors, customers, or other audiences about your company, before that information is sent out by someone else (and more directly than using a press release alone). This allows the company to appear more transparent with members of their market.
• Blogs offer benefits over other social mediums of connecting with a target audience due to the fact that editorial control (over posts and comment approvals) is in the hands of the company or their blogger.
• A corporate blog allows the company to be officially represented by an authority individual (CEO, other executive, etc.).
• Blogs are a natural networking tool, allowing a company and its owner to network with others in their industry (which can lead not only to connections, but also backlinks leading to targeted traffic and greater exposure).
• Blogs are usually updated fairly often, which search engines love. A well-optimized blog can help to draw in additional search engine traffic that might be interested in what the company has to offer.

Corporate blogging isn’t for all companies. Not all owners, CEOs, or executives are good bloggers naturally, and not every company will realize every benefit of business blogging. As with all things, know your market / audience, and tailor your efforts to them.

Business blogging, or corporate blogging, has potential PR value for even small business owners. If you’re considering setting up a company blog for your small or online business, there are several things you might do with that business blog, including:

1. Using the business blog to present company news, or the owner’s (or other high level executive’s) take on industry news issues.

2. Using the business blog as a way to educate the public, and more importantly your target market, about your products, services, etc.

3. Using the business blog as a tool to offer free industry information or articles, as a means of then driving Web traffic to other areas of your business site.

By creating a business blog for any of those reasons, you also have a free or inexpensive, yet powerful, PR tool. There are a variety of public relations benefits to business blogging, such as:

1. The ability to disseminate news.

2. The ability to quickly and directly gather feedback from your target audience.

3. The ability to build a company or personal reputation as an authority source in an industry or niche.

In order to best take advantage of the PR benefits of blogging (sometimes referred to as the marketing benefits of blogging), it’s important to keep the blog honest and ethical by industry standards. As much as blogging can be a PR benefit, it can also lead to negative publicity just as easily (such as if you were to release false information or just hype about a new product release), so always keep your business motives in mind when deciding to launch a business or corporate blog, and when deciding whether to blog yourself or hire a ghost writer as your business blogger.