A good way for a small business or company to establish an online presence is to start blogging. “I already have a blog, now what?” You see, a lot of small business owners have a tough time figuring out what kind of content to publish and which blogging styles to adopt.
Blogs can reap a list of benefits for small businesses as you can read from 10 Benefits for Businesses to Start Blogging which I wrote previously. In this blog post, I am going to pick top 10 blogging styles for a small business blog and elaborate on how you can properly utilize each of the styles.
Insight Blogging
Aim to become an expert within your niche. Insight blogging is all about sharing your expertise and opinion on trends within your industry. Yes, it can be hard to become a thought leader and publish original ideas. However, as long as your content is able to help your audience out on a particular issue related to your business, you will do just fine.
For example, if you are a car dealer, you can always blog about how your prospects can finance their car purchase using various options or your opinions of the latest car launch by Toyota.
Piggyback Blogging
There are news or events that catches the attention of the masses every single day. Piggyback blogging requires you to be nimble and ride the wave created by these buzzworthy happenings. By piggybacking, your blog will be able to gain extra traffic from various search engines and sources due to the spike in searches relating to such events.
Announcement Blogging
Have an upcoming product launch? Hired a new industry expert to work for you? Have a set of industry-related data or survey results that are not publicly available previously? Announcement blogging is the way for you to crack news and instead of piggybacking, you will be creating your own ripples.
Video Blogging
Videos content is becoming popular among Internet users. Instead of blogging using plain text, start targeting users that watch videos online by producing informational videos (in the form of presentations) or videos with a person talking to the camera (big head video).
Apart from satisfying prospects and customers that prefer video rather than text, you can also upload those videos to a huge list of video sharing sites that will allow your business to get in front of more eyeballs.
Link Blogging
If your business falls within a fast moving industry, such as the financial sector or the web industry, it is impractical for your blog to cover everything. What you can do is to link to blogs or news sites that report on the uncovered issues.
By doing so, your blog will gain traffic as a result of the pingbacks generated, have a high chance of getting the attention of an authoritative blogger as well as provide value to your blog visitors.
Response Blogging
Your small business will always have the risk of landing a crisis whether it is due to defective products, bad services or customers dissatisfaction that may or may not be broadcasted over social media platforms.
When this happens, response blogging is a good way to calm down confused customers and address them with remedial actions that you have taken. Under some circumstances whereby your followup actions are being accepted by the community, slowing down or stopping completely the negative buzz from spreading further is possible.
Evangelist Blogging
At first glance, if your brain linked this point to fake positive reviews, you are wrong. Evangelist blogging can be done on a company or small business blog by posting genuine customer testimonials and endorsements. Where to get these? ASK!
For some brands, these endorsements might already happened somewhere. Search for positive reviews. Ask reviewers, evangelists of your business or existing customers whether they could provide you with an endorsement which you will publish on your business blog. Also, be as transparent and authentic as possible in the way you present the endorsements on your business blog.
List Blogging
List posts such as a Top 10 (like this one 
), Top 100 or Top 50 lists of how to do something better or how to solve a problem are proven buzz generators for a blog. People and social media users love list posts because informative content are presented in a bite size manner.
Survey Blogging
I’m sure that as a business owner, you will receive complaints, questions or suggestions from time to time. Instead of replying to just the person making the complaints or asking the questions, why not reply or answer them on your blog. Also, if you are not receiving enough feedback, post a question on your blog for readers to answer.
First, these issues may be faced by others and by making your response public, you are sometimes addressing to more people than you thought. Secondly, this helps to build a community around your business and shortens the distance between you and your customers.
Guest Blogging
Most company and business blogs are managed by the founder, chief executive or a specific social media and PR person. Once in a while, invite some other members within your business to do the writing.
This allows readers to enjoy writings from a different perspective and internally, it generates the feeling of being part of your business among employees. AirAsia, a Malaysian budget airline, did this particularly well with their Just Plane Thoughts blog.
Presentation on More Blogging Styles
I got this blog post idea after referring to a presentation from SlideShare, with the title The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging by Rohit Bhargava from 360º Digital Influence.
Here’s the presentation. With the ideas that I have given you above and the other styles listed in the presentation, combine and find a mix for your own company or small business blog.
Any Blogging Style Ideas from You for Small Businesses?
With the 10 + 15 blogging styles above, I hope small business owners will now have no problems in trying to figure out what type of content they should publish on their business or company blog.
Do you have any other blogging style ideas to share?
Post them in the comments section and I’m sure small business owners reading this will appreciate it.
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Wayne Liew is an online marketing consultant, online marketer and editor of Wayne Liew Dot Com. 
