Many, and indeed most of you are already very familiar with blogs — along with RSS feeds and AJAX technology, it is the centerpiece of the Web 2.0 experience. What you may be less familiar with is the benefit that blogs can bring as a marketing tool for your online business. While many blogs are little more than amusing, but irrelevant to business, musings on life, a business or subject matter blog can build valuable traffic for your site, while helping to ‘personalize’ your visitors’ experience on your site.
The value added by blogs is twofold. The first is that blogs are like sweet, addictive candy to search engines. The major search engine’s algorithms are written to give precedence to sites that have constantly updated, fresh content. The thinking behind this is that sites that are constantly adding new, relevant information, will be of more value to a web surfer searching for a concept related to that site. Thus, if you’re in the widget business, and you’re blogging daily on the wonderful world of widgets, all things being equal, your site will rank higher on a search for ‘widgets’ than another site that merely mentions widgets in its static, unchanging content. There is substantial evidence that the googlebot, as well as other search engine spiders visit blogs on a far more regular basis than they hit static sites, and that blogs can and will achieve ranking on search engines far more quickly than can static sites.
The second benefit is that blogs, by their nature, have a more personal, informal tone to them. Rather than reading like dry, polished marketing copy, they typically take the form of a something written by a real person, to be read by real persons. In short, they’re personal, direct, and usually quite helpful and informative. As a result, web surfers tend to trust blog content far more than they do the hyped marketing copy on a static site.
So what is to be done? If you don’t already have one, start a blog for your site. It’s best to host your own blog on your own domain, so as to derive the maximum SEO benefit. Your web provider should be able to set you up with a blog fairly easily, and your web developer should be able to integrate it into your site without any real problems. Once you have your blog up and running, you can use various techniques to mirror your blog content on to your ’static’ pages on your site, which is both (a) an invitation to link to your blog from a static page, and (b) a great way to frequently update ALL of the pages on your site. Then, all you need to do is start blogging.
It’s important that you update your blog veryregularly - at least a couple of times a week, if not more often. The content of the blog posts should be fairly focused, and related to your business. It’s ok to be informal — people are often interested, for example, in a behind the scenes look, or in amusing and tastefulanecdotes about the business. The key is, though, to remain constructive at all times. You can have more than one blogger within your business posting on your blog — if you look around, you’ll likely find lots of hidden writers, itching to express themselves.
Once you’ve written your blog, you’ll need to market it. The best way to do that is to post blog entries, and comments, on other sites, and add sites to your blogroll. Developing a coherent linking strategy is one of the key aspects of boosting the popularity of your blog.
Many businesses are uncomfortable about allowing comments to blog postings — fearing that others may write negative comments about them. The reality is, though, that if someone is going to write something uncomplementary, they’re going to do so whether or not its on your site. If they do write it on your site, it gives you a golden opportunity to respond to the negative comment, both by addressing any legitimate issue raised, and posting your own reply to the comment, explaining your position.
Blogging, an integral part of the Web 2.0 experience, is a marketing outlet you cannot afford to let pass you by. At this point, if you haven’t already started, you won’t be the first on the block to do it, but at least you won’t be the last.