Justifying Blogs
by Randall McCarley
November 16th, 2006
It seems there are quite a few people out there that just don’t “get it” when it comes to blogging. Rand at SEOmoz wrote A Lot of People Have to Die for Corporate Blogging to Succeed. Many organizations require 3 levels of proofing before any communication can go out killing the creativity and excitement that goes into blogging.
BlogWrite for CEOs seems to justify blogs or promote their uses every 3 posts or so.
Church of the Customer points out the single greatest value to blog and gives 7 reasons small business should blog.
Mary Schmidt explains how blogging isn’t “playing on the computer” (something my wife accuses me of).
And I’ve seen several other similar posts over the last couple weeks.
I’m going to make this real simple: If you want more customers or want to improve the customer experience for your business get a website. If you want to take that to the next level, add a blog.
Blogs draw traffic and create unique networking opportunities. Yes you can use them to engage your ego or express yourself or *whatever* but the results speak for themselves.
I will continue to urge my clients to add blogs when appropriate. And I will continue to keep this one running as best I can.
For anyone unwilling to take two minutes to Google the value of blogging I just have this to say: Thank you for your customers.
Is that enough justification?
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November 16th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Nice post Rand.
I have to admit I didn’t realise how powerful blogging was until I started myself.
November 19th, 2006 at 10:36 am
One of the more interesting phenomenon surrounding blogs is how the “Wow! I never dreamed this was so great!” factor almost always emerges from business bloggers. Blogs work for building relationships with customers, clients, suppliers, and other stakeholders by starting conversations. Blogs build trust through openess and transparency, and people buy from those whom they know and trust. Blogs rank highly on the search engines to the point where I consider a blog the fast track to the top of the search engines. Blogs work internally for a company for interoffice communications and as powerful content management systems. Blogs are also a lot of fun to write and maintain. “Wow! I never dreamed blogs were so great!”
November 19th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
It seems blogging has a legacy of arm-twisting. Several people were pushing me to get one. Then I tested the options and setled on WP. Getting it live here has brought incredible results incuding visibility in the industry. If you want to gain visibility in your industry, start a blog! It will help you dominate the field if nobody else is doing it or help you keep if if they are!
BTW Sophie and Wayne, welcome! I’m glad you found my little area of the internet and got some value from it.