Most small businesses can’t afford to retain a PR firm to write releases, place them on the news wires, and schmooze with the media. Good PR campaigns help promote the business goals and are frequently getting distributed to the wire services. What these businesses overlook is how well a business blog can acheive these same goals.

By writing and releasing company news to your blog everyday, it increases the likelihood that someone will find you in a search engine - just like your press release will. With Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Twitter, and so many other RSS or social media sites - distributing your “PR” is easy. If you are leveraging these sites, and promoting your blog frequently, other people will see your news and help you distribute it. Read a good press release from a company you admire (someone whose PR you’ve noticed in the past) and use the press release as a template for your blog post. You won’t likely be as detailed, but it should help provide focus.

For example, customer wins are a great way to publicize your company on the blog. You don’t always need to release something formal, and by blogging about it first you can still come back and do a more official release if the opportunity arises.

Product or service updates are another great topic for blog posts. If you don’t have any new customers you feel you can talk about, and your product hasn’t changed recently, look at how some of your customers are using your product and service and highlight their experience. It doesn’t have to be “customer experienced 305% ROI” to be interesting (although if you have that customer, write about them frequently.)

Sometimes it’s as simple as letting your inner evangelist speak regularly about your company. I often find, especially with entrepreneurs that their vision for their company is infectious and is a great source of blog material that adds a personal voice to the company. The next time someone in your company has a great success story - blog it out.

Tags: busines-blogging, business-blogs, PR, pr-blogging

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Business Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.