As you set out to grow your venture or start-up in 2008, make sure to take advantage of these 5 ways blogs can support your venture. Look for much more advice on blogging and examples of the features discussed on the fundfindr blog in coming weeks.

5 Ways to Blog to Success!

1. Create a conversation with your customers. Direct dialogue with your customers is essential and much literature recently has backed up this fact. Blogs let you publish content on your website, on a stand-alone site or via a feed that your customers can subscribe to. Rather than seeing sales drop off and then investigating, use a blog to have a conversation on news, ideas and issues related to your business. The very nature of blogs will provide feedback while programs like Google Analytics will help you understand who your subscribers are, where they are coming from, and what they like best on your blog. Want to get started? Check out Wordpress or TypePad. Or start using a content management system such as Drupal or our personal favourite, Joomla.

2. Build Brand Equity. Most businesspeople know that your brand is far more than your logo. Your brand is the combination of everyone’s mental imprint (brand image) and the summation of their contact with you (brand experience). The dynamic nature of blogs allows you to easily provide positive imagery and tap into the power of emotion through media such as podcasts and video. You can showcase positive customer experiences - whether they started that way or you managed their experience from bad to good - while still providing more transparency than websites allow. Blogs allow you to give customers a feeling of being insiders when you preview upcoming products or services or that their opinions matter when you conduct surveys or research. Strive to present your content in a compelling fashion and provide value even when you are not selling and you will further benefit from the viral pass-along that blogs enable.

3. Enhance Search Engine Rankings. The dynamic nature of regularly updated content on a specific item, brand or issue means that search engines love blogs. Take advantage of this for your business by posting at least a few times weekly, adding metadata which most blogs make easy to do and by using keywords in your headlines and introductory paragraphs so they get picked up in RSS readers.

4. Create Alliances to grow traffic. The collaborative culture of blogs is one of you scratch my back, I will scratch yours. Everyone wants the same things - traffic, positive associations, publicity and customer dialogue. So you can take advantage of this culture especially as your content and blog following grows. Here’s how: Find some relevant blogs and link to them via a blogroll (index of other blogs adjacent to your blog) or feature them in a post. Then contact them and let them know. Many blog posts are trackbacks (mentions that someone else talked about them) or items of interest picked up from other blogs. So, done well you can often get a link or mention in return which provides valuable exposure and traffic. Some sites like www.johnchow.com, which blogs on how to make money from blogging, will even review your blog for a small fee. Of course, these alliances build further brand equity!

5. Use a blog aggregator to manage time and stay current. Our fundfindr favourite aggregator is Netvibes, others include FeedBurner, Bloglines, and Google Reader. An aggregator works by bringing all your feeds - business, sports, news, whatever - together in a single place in a priority and fashion that you can customize. This allows you to quickly scan the latest posts for relevant info without having to visit the websites. A great way to start your day is 20 minutes on the aggregator and you are current and can get back to building your business.

Of course, the fundfindr blog is your go-to source for news, interviews and stories designed for entreprenuers wishing to grow their business, attract expertise, collaboration and funding.