Which companies are doing great things with business blogs and which should you benchmark as you develop your own business blog?  I’m going to point you in the direction of two companies whose business blogs you should be reading.

First up — Nuts About Southwest from Southwest Airlines

The Nuts About Southwest blog from Southwest Airlines has been a blog to watch for years.  It’s written by Southwest Airlines employees who are given the freedom to write posts with their own voices and telling their own stories.  I’d recap what the blog is all about here, but you really need to read the About page on the Nuts About Southwest blog to truly understand what makes this blog stand out from the crowd and really connect with readers.

And second — Zappos Blogs

Zappos is another example of a company that does great things with its business blogs.  Zappos operates a number of business blogs, but the two you need to check out first are the main Zappos blog and the Zappos CEO and COO blog.  Even though the former Zappos CEO has left the company, his posts during his tenure (pre-May 2010) demonstrate a company executive who actually “gets” social media.

What business blogs do you read to benchmark as you develop your own?  Leave a comment and share your opinion.

Last month, I put out a call for business submissions asking people who use WordPress or another blogging application for their company websites (not just business blogs) to submit their URLs for a new series here on BusinessLogs that showcases businesses using blogging applications in cool ways.

It’s time to highlight another business doing great things with blogging applications in the WordPress for Business Websites series, and the company website featured today is Le Tutor.

As Aaron of Le Tutor explained in his submission:

“I love WordPress for business applications and advocate that all small businesses convert to using it. It takes all of the pain out of running your own website and you can have an amazing looking website for a quarter of what design agencies will charge you for a sub par site.”

The Le Tutor site has a great color palette.  Its clean design and use of images makes it easy to find information.

The site also makes great use of video by incorporating a testimonials section filled with both videos and written testimonials.  Also, notice the strategic use of the sidebar to include information, a contact form, and video content.

The Le Tutor site also includes a blog filled with written and video posts that offer a mix of informational, educational and fun posts.

Kudos to Le Tutor for demonstrating that there is so much you can do with WordPress to make a business website standout without investing a huge amount of money.

To have your website considered for the WordPress for Business Websites here on BusinessLogs, follow this link, and leave a comment on the Call for Business Submissions post with your company website’s URL.

This is my first business blog profile, but I hope to review specific business blogs every couple of weeks. Today, we’ll be looking at Team JAPANiCAN Staff Blog. This is the business blog of JAPANiCAN.com, a site that lets you book Japan hotels.

Good Qualities

The JAPANiCAN staff is doing a lot things right with their blog.

First, they use pictures liberally. I’ve written before that images can improve a blog so much and that’s especially true when you’re working in the travel niche. Nearly every post on JAPANiCAN’s blog has an image and many of them have more than one image.

Second, I like how JAPANiCAN adds a personal touch to their blog by including pictures of their staff. I’ve inserted their blog’s header at the top of this post and you can see that it has a small group picture of the staff. Also, each post has a link to the author of the post. The author pages have a short bio and picture of the author.

I think it’s great that the head of the staff actually writes blog entries. His name is Hiro Imaizumi and here is his profile.

By the way, I like that JAPANiCAN has multiple bloggers. Having multiple authors for your business blog is a great idea. More authors lets you have more blog posts and each author brings a different point of view, which gives your blog variety in topics and writing style.

Third, JAPANiCAN updates their blog pretty regularly. They started it about a year ago and have averaged about eight posts per month. Their posting frequency shows they are committed to their blog. They only have three posts for this month but hopefully they’ll turn that around and start posting more frequently like they did before.

Fourth, they have a good mixture of posts that just give information and posts that have both information and offers. I’ve written before about the importance of making offers but you don’t want to overdo it and make your blog look like a big sales pitch.

Recommendations

Here are some recommendations I would give to the JAPANiCAN staff about their blog.

On the home page of the site, I didn’t find a link to the blog. I would insert a link to the blog on the home page that’s easy to find.

I would place the links to the author profiles at a more prominent place.  A good spot is close to the blog post titles. This will get readers to click on the links and get to know the bloggers better.

The current blog URL is http://blog.japanican.com/en/staffblog/index.html. It would be cleaner to use the short URL http://blog.japanican.com/.

Finally, I recommend that the header be linked to the blog home page.