Blogs are publications in the internet about the blog creator's (blogger) interest, thoughts, and opinions. Some people use blogs like a personal diary that describes their everyday lives.

A corporate blog is a type of blog that is published with the support of an organization to reach their goals, such as, marketing and selling their products and services.

Businesses create a blog to strengthen relationships with important target groups and the positioning of the publishing organization as industry experts. This means that an organization creates blogs to show their knowledge about the industry they're in.

In a business perspective, corporate blogs is used as advertising, much like TV ads, print ads, audio ads, and so on. There are other reasons why corporate blogs are used; the main reason is to create stronger relations with target groups.

Reasons for corporate blogging

Place your company as the leader of the industry your company is in. Be knowledgeable about the topic.

Your forum, where your main objective is not to sell, should focus on a more personal relationship with your customers. Create a forum specially made for customer relations between your company and your customers. This is great for customers to interact with each other and you can also receive reliable feedbacks for your product.

Blogs is a great way for employees or project members to keep in touch with each other and discuss on making the project or product better. It will be like meetings only they do it through blogs.

Remember that you should keep blogs easy to read and avoid technical terms about the topic.

Another great thing about a blog is that it is informal. People can converse just like friends and can place their opinions about the topic and express their ideas to make it better.

If you do it right, many businesses like yours will link their website to yours. They will regard you as an expert on the industry.

There are six different types of corporate blogs. Each has its characteristics and different styles.

Sales Blog

Sales blog purpose is to advertise or sell products or services. The organization itself will be writing the blog.

The target group of this type of blog is potential clients or customers and people that are directly involved with the publishing organization.

Relationship Blogs

The purpose of this blog is to create and strengthen relationship with target organizations. The target group of this blog is smaller than that of the sales blog.

Branding Blogs

The purpose of this blog is to strengthen the brand or profile of the publishing organization or the people in it. The blogger is usually the individuals in the organization and are supported by the organization. The target groups in this blog are the same as those of the relationship and sales blog.

Knowledge Blogs

The purpose of this blog is to give employees information relating to their work and also about the organizations news, business intelligence and also about the ongoing projects. The blogger is usually the organization itself or someone within the organization assigned to do the task. The target groups for this blog are all employees with a specific interest.

Collaboration Blogs

This blog is used to provide a working team with a tool for research, collaboration and discussion about ongoing projects and ideas. The blogger and target group for this blog is the team itself.

Culture Blogs

Culture blogs is used to strengthen organizational culture. Often, the content of this blog concerns social or non-work related character. This type of blog creates personal relationships between the employees no matter what their positions in the organization are.

Corporate blogging is mainly used to strengthen the relationship between customers and employees of an organization. Blogs create a sense of personal view of the products and can freely express their opinions about the product or services. It is also a great way to get employees to work more efficiently by sharing their ideas and opinions about an ongoing project.

Starting a corporate blog is fairly easy. You don't need to know about coding or buy anything, like softwares and programs. There are many free blog publishing in the internet, where you can use its services easily and free of charge. Some blog publishing websites even has blogging wizards, which will help you on a step-by-step basis when creating a blog.