Ken Moorhead is the social media manager and blog editor for Compendium, the business blogging platform. When not busy writing creative briefs for the Compendium staff blog, he fills the hours with MBA studies and general hijinx.

Blogging. More like “blah-ging” right? Not quite, people. Sure, a blog is a great place to post funny pictures of cats, but it’s also a killer marketing tool that can fuel both your search and social media strategies.  Business blogging is a different animal with its own tricks of the trade. But what makes a blog good for business in the first place? Lucky you: that’s exactly what the next six minutes of reading are all about.

Blogging is conversational

A blog is a great place to toss aside the super-polished “marketing-approved” buzzphrases and actually speak in a natural, informal voice. Don’t get me wrong – carefully crafted marketing messages are important to any brand strategy, and elements of them should be present in a business blog. But a blog is also a great place to try new angles on your messages – take advantage of the less formal setting, play with some wacky analogies and ask readers to interact and participate.

Blogging enhances search

No, no, the blogging guy isn’t here to tell you all about SEO and SERPs and keywords and linking strategies – I’m happy to leave that to the experts here at Slingshot SEO. But the fact remains that a blog is a great component of a broader SEO strategy. Each blog post has its own little permanent home on your website, and over time you’ll build up a large library of content that can perform well in more specific, longtail search queries. Even better – the blog is a great place to link directly to key areas on your website that you really want visitors to go to: product pages or informational download offers.

Blogging demonstrates thought leadership

Everyone’s an expert at something, and your company is filled with years of accumulated knowledge and internal best-practices. Your blog is the place to showcase all of the experts in your company – not just the C-Suite. And don’t give me that malarkey about “Oh, but that doesn’t work in my industry. Nobody goes online to read blogs about our kind of stuff.” Indium Corporation*, a B2B metals and solder paste manufacturer, is winning blogging awards and recognition hand over fist for turning their engineers loose on the blog with posts like “Is My Unused Indium Sulfamate Plating Bath Worth Anything?”Answer: Yes it is, and Eric Bastow will even tell you how to extract it.

Blogging is linkable and sharable

So this is the piece I really dig as a social media nerd. Blogs are the fuel of choice for a social media strategy – not only should you be sharing and promoting your blog posts on company Twitter, Facebook and other social properties, but you should let your readers do the same! Sharing widgets are easy to add to any template, and give your blog posts the ability to grow into networks outside your current audience. Tweet it, Like it, Email it… make it easy for readers to pass your posts along to their friends and followers!

Blogging is a more permanent repository for social media marketing

The truth of the matter is that social networks were built for individuals and consumers first, and businesses have flocked to them as new marketing channels. But the terms and conditions of these sites aren’t always business-friendly. You make the rules on your own website and blog; on a social network, you’re playing by someone else’s. Root your social strategy on your own turf, and use other networks as additional channels to engage with people and drive them back to the blog.

Blogging facilitates the re-imagining of marketing materials

“But where am I going to find the time to write for my blog? How often should I post?” Don’t worry, I hear you. This all sounds great until you realize that the whole darned thing hinges upon somebody actually writing something. The truth is, it’s only as hard as you make it – and you don’t have to make it that hard. Remember how we talked about experimenting with marketing messages on the blog? Tailor and repurpose your marketing collateral (or even your ads in the Sunday paper!) for use on the blog. Expand on ideas that didn’t develop fully in that last whitepaper. Offer an alternative interpretation of the findings from someone else’s eBook.  The dirty little secret about this post is that I whipped it together pretty quickly based on our new guide, Understanding Business Blogging. If this post was a good read, you should definitely check it out for the full story on business blogging.

Hopefully you now have a better idea of what business blogging is all about – it’s  definitely more than funny pictures of cats. If augmenting your SEO efforts with more content or sustaining a social media marketing strategy are priorities for your firm, a blog is the tool of choice. You can get the full version of Compendium’s Understanding Business Blogging whitepaper here.

*Full disclosure: Indium Corporation is a Compendium client.