Personal blog vs Business blog

A blog is low cost and effective way for businesses to communicate with its customers. There are basically two types of blogs - personal blog and business blog. A personal blog is an update of what is happening in your life, your thoughts and opinions. Personal blogs are especially fitting for businesses that cater to improving people's lives. For example, a personal blog will not be out of place on the website of a personal trainer, life coach or a financial adviser. In these cases it is possible to incorporate valuable information within personal blog. The personal aspects of the blog will help you establish that human connection with your customers, which is invaluable. A business blog on the other hand provides value to its customers by sharing the business expertise and knowledge. At the same time, it allows the business to keep their customers updated on upcoming events, products and any other news that they wish to share. Both these blog types have their respective use in a business website and a choice between them depends entirely on the type of business. As long as you can keep the content focused enough to provide information and value to your customers, they will keep coming back for more.

Some companies have both a personal blog for its employees and a business blog. Allowing your employees to have their own blog on the company website gives them a sense of being a part of a bigger team and also allows them to directly connect with their respective niche clients. Of course when you allow employees to have their blog on the company website, you have to make sure you lay out the rules for blogging very clearly. Some of the key points you should include in your blogging guidelines for your employees should include:

• Conduct Guidelines - Just as employees have to follow certain conduct guidelines at work, they should be given very clear guidelines on the acceptable online communication and blogging behavior
• Legal liabilities - Employees should me made aware of their legal liabilities for the content they post
• Allowed content - Give them guidelines on the content that they are allowed to post
• Off-limit content - Confidential information and any other blog items that are completely off limit should be very clearly communicated to your employees
• Response for press inquiries - There should be an established hierarchy for response to inquiries from press and all your employees should be made aware of this