As a owner/director of a small business, I was interested in the effectiveness of a blog as a business tool. As a graphic designer working in web media (and print), I was also curious about the business benefits of a blog site. I decided to investigate the value by starting a blog myself – which I did on 17th March. (Why I wasn’t out celebrating St Patrick’s Day instead, I have no idea …)
I set out to blog with three main goals: (1) to increase my online presence (as Liam Dempsey, versus the online presence of lbdesign); (2) to write valuable articles about web and print design, with a few bits and pieces about pubs, beer and drinking thrown in as well to keep the site exciting for non-designers; (3) to drive traffic to my business website.
As a web designer, I have a fair bit of knowledge about search engine optimisation or SEO (not an expert, but well versed). With that in mind, I tweaked this blog to increase the selected key words of ‘Liam Dempsey’ and ‘lbdesign’. To that end, this blog has been a brilliant success. Within a two week period, my listing on a Google search for ‘Liam Dempsey’ climbed from the second page of results to the top result. From a business standpoint, this is very important. I am lbdesign and lbdesign is me (especially since lbdesign is such a small company); potential clients can now find me very, very easily.
The aim of my second goal is to demonstrate to potential clients that I have the knowledge and experience required to deliver top design solutions. I also had a secondary aim of providing valuable tips and advice to other designers. I have certainly benefited from other designers’ experience and knowledge and I wanted to repay that favour.
The third goal is really crucial: increasing business traffic at www.lbdesign.tv. When I decided upon this goal, I knew it would be a long-term project. To be honest, I have not promoted this blog site as I am still tweaking the look and feel and coming to terms with the best way to manage the functionality. Since 17th March, there have been a handful of click-throughs from this blog to the lbdesign website. Ok, so nothing worth getting too excited about yet, but it’s promising that even though I have not mentioned this site to any clients, it is still driving visitors through.
So, yes, this blog site is proving a valuable business tool. I’ve achieved the first goal, the second goal is on-going (and in some ways, achieved) and the third goal of this blog seems to be on the horizon.