21 Reasons to Blog

(Rule number one of good blog writing – blog readers love lists!)

1. Because blogging drives traffic to your website. The blog can feed a stream of tweets, Facebook updates and newsletter content as well as leaving a trail of content for the search engines. For more on the “Blog Central” concept see http://www.usingconversationalmedia.com/blogging-for-business/
2. To engage with your audience and collect customer feedback (blogs allow comments and 2-way dialogue. If you get really lucky with a post, your customers will start talking to each other).
3. Because it makes SEO sense – search engines love websites with updated, unique, keyword dense copy. They reward it with a higher page rank. Blogging works for SEO – see this post for more detail. http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/article-marketing/how-i-boosted-a-simple-blog-post-onto-the-first-page-of-google/
4. To enable you to sell more – a first visit to your website is like a first date – are you really expecting your customer to go all the way? Woo them. It takes time to develop trust and commitment.
5. To position yourself and your company as a thought leader in your market. This demonstrates your expertise to potential customers, provides post purchase reassurance and also makes you one of the “go to” places for information.
6. To create a place to think, plan and reflect. I find that writing about something often helps me figure out my own opinion on it. It also forces me to really consider the issues and justify my thinking.
7. To make a big impact with zero budget. Sure blogging takes time but it shouldn’t be a work of art. Try to incorporate blogging into your weekly routine. Find windows of time to blog (I’m writing this while waiting for dinner in a hotel restaurant).
8. To showcase products and images and tell behind the scenes stories. You, rather than a journalist, are in charge of your content.
9. Because its a place to be more informal and risqué.
10. Because it humanises your company – people buy from people, not websites.
11. To improve your writing – good for your job and your career.
12. To create content for newsletters .
13. To play with technology and ideas.
14. To force you to read and research about your market in order to gather the information you need for your posts whether researching an article from scratch or repurposing content from elsewhere.
15. To collaborate with others – guest posts are really effective and it gives you the chance to interview others in your industry, work with other departments, talk to customers, senior staff and even the odd celebrity.
16. Because there is no need to wait for the webmaster to publish a new page or a journalist to write about your new product.
17. To express yourself and create a historical record of your content – in 3 years of blogging I now have hundreds of entries, a huge archive of brilliant marketing material that we ransack on a daily basis. Those posts answer customer questions, showcase the expertise of the company in an easily searchable online archive.
18. To podcast/videocast easily.
19. Because it is enjoyable, compulsive and rewarding.
20. Because it doesn’t have to be perfect.
21. Because interruption marketing doesn’t work any more.

Blogging for Business

Last year I attended a digital marketing conference where an expert panel including no less than Smart Insights’ Dave Chaffey was taking questions & answers. The one area all the experts seemed to all agree on is that the blog (in the UK at least) is one of the best, and yet one of the most underutilised social media tools.

Yes there are something like 156M active blogs out there but relatively few organisations have really started using them effectively. Where they have, however, they have found a tool that delivers on multiple fronts. Your blog is a place for you to develop newsletter content, integrate with other social media tools, showcase your expertise, play with ideas, research a topic and discover customer views. Blogs also yield dividends in terms of SEO as other sites pick up your content giving you invaluable back links, and customers will get on with the job of tweeting and liking your work. Optimised well, platforms such as WordPress enable content to be rapidly indexed certainly most of my posts are indexed within a few hours, often within minutes. And we know that search engines love fresh keyword relevant content so play the game, write your post and optimise it for search (more on this in a future post).

Below is a model I’ve developed called Blog Central. It neatly shows how blogging can drive much of your customer communications activity.

Using the Blog Central model I am able to utilise blogging, e-newsletters and other social media in an integrated manner. For the purpose of this description my business is irrelevant really, but if the context helps you, I sell training DVDs online to church based musicians. I blog most days and every week or so collect the posts together to create a newsletter which is then e-mailed out to my organically grown mailing list. Read more