How a Computer Repair Company can Blog for Business

They say, “You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.” Marketing experts have been telling us for years, “You must write down a marketing plan to crystallize your thoughts.”

The act of writing forces the author to become more involved and to examine closely the business they are engaged in. By clearly defining your business, it provides giant steps in shaping a marketing plan.

Blogging is one way to crystallize your thoughts. The act of blogging creates a trend towards the path of least resistance. It sharpens and defines the interests of the author, revealing hidden qualities that may not have been apparent in the past.

In other words you end up writing about subjects which interests you the most. Blogging therefore has a therapeutic quality that can benefit a business and the owner.

One interesting avenue to explore in marketing a computer repair business is to ask yourself, “Do end users find computer service providers via a search on the Internet? The answer is yes they do! The search engine can become a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal. One way of finding the search engines, is by blogging.

The search engines love them and visit them often. The way to use blogs is when making a post, is to include a link to your site or web page that you want spidered. Google for example owns the free blog site blogger.com.

If you update your site regularly, their search engine will visit on a daily basis. They take a snapshot of the blog and follow links from the pages. If you make changes to pages and want them re-indexed, then "help" Google to find these updated pages. It is simple, correct, and very powerful method.

People often include their home towns or cities in the search criteria when searching for goods and services on the Internet. This is not a well known fact as most computer repair businesses do not reproduce their home address in the website content

One way to test this, is to go to the Overture (Yahoo) word selection tool at www.overture.com and stick in “computer repair Houston” and see how many times that phrase was searched in a month. (870 searches in April.) Then put the same phrase with speech marks phrase into Yahoo and see what results you get. At the time of writing, the search yielded 879 results. This is a low outcome as most of the results are just directories.

Internet search is a valuable new way of attracting new customers. By using a blog you can have more control on the Internet. If you wade through the first five pages of the Yahoo results above, there are not many individual repair websites to be found.

“Computer repair” is the most common term used to look for maintenance companies. It would be common sense to impregnate your blog or website with these terms.

What Information do you Include in a Computer Repair Blog?

If you run a technical blog for example, content is very easy to acquire. Obtainable on the Internet is a ton of articles and solutions about computer problems and related fixes. You can do a search, pull the info you require, put it in your own words and here you have content for a posting.

The trick is to stick with “easy to read” articles which follow a common theme for a segment of the computer end users. By following the path of least resistance (as explained in the adjacent article) you have a mechanism for self promotion and a subtle way to analyze yourself and find out what interests you the most.

If you publish a constant contact newsletter you can post it on your blog and have an archive of back editions. Normally newsletters get thrown out and having an online reference library can make your newsletters more effective. You are not limited to using only one blog so you could use a private blog for every important customer.

For example you deal with schools and have more than one contact at a school you could have a common notice board for all parties to use. Instead of only using email you could post all services and equipment supplied on your blog as a permanent record.

Blogging Benefits

Writing does help a computer repair business. There is no doubt in my mind that it does crystallize thoughts and cut through the fog. Some say it is a form of self absorbed navel gazing. Speaking from personal experience in writing newsletters for ten years, I have found it is a huge help in pointing the business in the right direction.

Have a look at this excellent blog and see how it promotes their business. www.absoluteraleigh.com/blog You can see how the blog links back to their website. This is a potentially a good traffic builder as it specifically lists model names and numbers which is excellent for discovery by search engines.

In doing a blog yourself make sure to list the URL with all the key search engines. To keep a check on your blog and verify it is listed with the major search engines, run a search query using the URL of your blog.