Company blogs have many uses

May 15th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Until you start your business blog, it’s all theoretical. Once a blog’s an active part of your company’s Web site however, you’ll be asking yourself why you waited so long.

The article “Vendors are blogging for dollars” points out:

Storage vendors such as EMC, HDS, NetApp and others are increasingly hosting blogs as a means to draw the individuals they most desire to reach and influence to their Web sites. These blogs serve a number of purposes. They can provide users with product updates from engineers and product managers working on specific products. Users can gain additional insight into the future of the product and provide input on its design.

Colleges are using blogs too. “Colleges use student blogs to recruit new generation” says that:

Colleges seeking a competitive edge are increasingly enlisting and sometimes paying student bloggers to chronicle their lives online.

The results run the gamut from insightful to boring, but the goal is the same: to find a new way to win the attention of the MySpace generation.

“We found it a much freer, less constricting, far more believable way of letting prospective students glimpse what was going on on campus,” said Seth Allen, dean of admissions at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

The primary benefit of a blog is immediacy, closely followed by visibility. A blog lets you stay in touch with your various audiences at minimal cost. It also ensures that your company is visible online.


Why you should blog your business

May 5th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

There are several compelling reasons for you to add a blog to your business’s Web site:

* A blog gets more traffic to your site every day, without cost to you. Your blog will “ping” (send a message to a blog aggregator) whenever you make a new post, resulting in first a trickle of traffic, and then a flood;

* Your site visitors can subscribe to your blog’s feed with Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which means that you can stay in contact with them, again for free (all blogs have built-in RSS);

* Your blog can function as both a marketing and a customer relationship management tool. It’s a way to turn your customers into fans, and to reveal more about your business to potential customers and get sales; and

* It’s a way to build your brand and make sales… without advertising.

A blog takes just minutes to set up, and while it may take months (or over a year) for the search engines to index a new site, a blog will usually be indexed with a week. Link your blog to your site, and your site get a boost into the engines’ primary index.