In this guide we’ll be looking at the ways of blogging for your business. Keeping regular articles going on to your website is one of the most important techniques and easiest ways that you can keep your website refreshed, up to date and in the good books of Google and other search engines. Google absolutely loves websites that have recent content. It hates websites that are not updated or with single items posted and then nothing else. When you search do you opt for the website that was set up in 2011 and has had nothing added to it since, or do you go for the website from the company who regularly provide updates as to the work they are doing and their services? I suspect the latter.

There is no right or wrong in business blogging and this is where most people fail at the first hurdle. Any content is better than no content, no matter how controversial or poor your writing is.

Let’s take a builder. He is out on site all day long, building an extension, constructing a pathway or demolishing an old barn. Whilst he is at work he has no time at all to get a computer out and start typing a blog entry, and when he is at home he has better things to do than sit at his computer writing something that someone else may or may not ever read.

Or consider the services of a solicitor. A solicitor at work is responsible for generating fees. The whole time they are at work they must be doing fee earning work (which is why they are known as fee earners) because anything else is simply not generating income to pay their wages. When they are not generating fees they will be eating lunch, and when they are not eating lunch they’ll be going home and doing better things that sitting and typing blog entries, articles and pieces of advice into their computer.

So how on earth does anybody ever add things to their website or keep a regular blog going with lots of recent updates? So many company “blogs” consist of two or three articles which are added when the website was first set up and then nothing since. Two or three articles added when the website was set up will be absolute garbage and drivel either written by the website developer himself or herself, or something a company director wrote in a matter of seconds without any information anyone would ever want.

There is so much more to business blogging and it is so easy to do, and that is the purpose of this series of articles.

The first article is on finding time to blog.

Finding Time to Blog

This is the key to being a successful blogger. Firstly do not be put off by the word blogger as it simply means writer or article writer or copier of information from something someone else has written and presenting it in a different light so it looks like something you have written.

There is no right or wrong to any form of writing for your website, but it is so important to do it if you want to attract more business to your company. Websites are really easy places to get new business from and so few people go to the trouble of spending time building or expanding their online empire.

Most of the excuses we hear are “I just don’t have time to sit down and write anything and even if I did, I can’t think of anything to write as I’m too tired from being at work”.

We have a solution for you and it is so easy to do, even someone who left school without any qualifications and has never written anything other than their name can do it.

It involves using your mobile phone as a dictating device and having the discipline when you’re driving anywhere to speak into your phone in order to create information and articles.

I am writing this article whilst doing a school run from a small village near to Mold into Chester to pick up my children. I do this usually once if not twice a day, and I have about 40 minutes each way in order to dictate any articles I may choose to do.

Sitting in your car and talking into your phone on record mode is fine, provided you don’t touch your phone to do anything with it or use it as a phone device.

Yes but surely if the police see me holding my phone in front of me and speaking into it it’s highly likely I will be stopped and given points and fined? Yes of course, so one of the things you need to do to start off with is find a solution for sitting in your car with your phone not in your hand and a way of the phone picking up your voice.

We use an Olympus DS3300 to do our dictation work whilst in the car. It is a small handheld device but importantly can take a lapel mic which attaches to the top of your shirt of blouse and plugs into the top of the dictation machine. This means that when you set off driving you can press record, start speaking and not have to touch the small digital dictation machine again until you have finished doing your article. It is very simple and easy to do. There are also microphones available to plug into the tops of iPhones, Samsung S3’s and a whole range of other smart phones, and as most people have a smart phone this is what we think you should use to do your recording and drastically improve your work presence.

Every time you are in the car by yourself, or van, switch on your voice recorder and start speaking. Do not be embarrassed that someone else is going to hear the information you are dictating as they don’t really care how you sound or what you are saying, because we are going to suggest a solution to you for your work to be transcribed without you needing to do anything else involving a computer other than reading your documents.

www.tptranscription.co.uk provides a bloggers’ typing service, which essentially means you can dictate your articles, send them to tptranscription.co.uk and we will return them to you in a format ready to go on to your website as an article or blog entry. The cost is minimal, the service is simple and no-one else ever needs to hear your voice other than the professional transcriber who will be completing the work.

It does not matter what you speak about, it is the fact that you are writing that is the important issue here. Writing as much as you can on a daily basis to go on to your website to improve your online presence.

Getting started at this is one of the hardest things you will do, and also thinking up ideas of things to blog about, but if you keep making mental notes throughout your working week then usually the topics and subjects for blogging and dictating into your recorder when driving will become apparent to you.

For example we have thought of doing this series of articles because in March we will be attending the Chester Business Show to demonstrate our service to small businesses and to show them how they can improve their web presence simply by speaking into their smart phones and getting us to do the hard work of turning it into a document for website use. As a result of this I had a mental note to write a series of articles all about blogging and how to do it effectively. One article done and dusted in less than 15 minutes!