x5 reasons to blog

• Improved SEO – a steady flow of dynamic content published on a weekly basis to your web site. Search engine spiders will pick up on this activity, register it and re-index your site with greater frequency. Blogging also gives you the opportunity to create new web pages that are optimised with specific keywords – eg, customer experience management. These new blog pages should link through to key pages in your main site, as well as key external pages. Again, this is good for SEO, as it increases the level at which your site is associated with those terms by search engines – eg, Google’s PageRank algorythm works this way. You should also encourage partner organisations to link their blog posts to your blog posts along the same keyword optimised lines – again, this garners Google respect.

• Sales referrals and messages – blog posts can be an extremely effective way of recording key sales strategies, discussions and messages for future external reference. For example, you have x3 similar sales conversations with similar questions/objections raised in week one. The penny drops in week two as you forumlate a compelling answer to these questions – and you document your thoughts/messages via a new blog post. In week three the same queries are raised and you point x3 customers to this new blog post via a link in an email. Voila! You have a consistent story for the market!

• Seeding marketing collateral – along the lines noted above, your blogs may address market questions, issues and/or concerns. Over time you may find yourself devoting a disproportionate amount of time to writing on one theme. This tells you that it’s important and also that it may be worth some additional time and effort to create something more formal around the idea – such as a white paper or a brochure. In this way blogging can be a test bed for your marketing efforts….particularly if you collect comments on your blog posts. More comment means more interest and more scope for developing marketing material (as well as providing you with a free source of ideas!)

• Establishing authority – blogging ought to help you establish a unique voice in a (noisy) market. From an awareness point of view, this is the SEO effect described above. If you’re writing around certain keywords, then search engines will recognise this and you increase your likelihood of being discovered by new audiences. But, more than this, and particularly in crowded markets, your blog can be an important point of differentiation in a world dominated by bland market-speak. Say it differently, more intelligently and with more passion and people will listen.

• R&D Feedback – much like the marketing message loop described above, when deployed in specific areas, blogs can act as effective focus groups for sounding out new development ideas. For example, a technical software blog designed for floating new development ideas amongst your seed customers may work well – it has a very focused, trustworthy and interested audience who will respond to your writing and offer feedback because it effects their own lives/work intimately. Note – this is a prerequisite when you’re looking for feedback in a blog: your audience must be engaged and ‘in the loop.

So…what you waiting for? GO BLOG!