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.
