Front Office Box

A web site is pretty much a “must have” for most businesses these days, or at least a presence on somebody else’s.  It’s like a brochure but in web pages, not paper.

Web sites were exciting ten years ago, but the Internet world has moved on. Static pages are past their sell by date, and now blogs are the thing.  Every business should be into blogging.  Here’s why!

• With a traditional marketing site you choose what your visitors see, and if you don’t express it in quite the right terms they may not find what they want.  With a blog you put everything you know in different pages and let the visitor choose. It’s a much better experience for the reader, and more productive for the author as a result.  Of course you have to write all the pages but you are the expert after all.

• Search engines can only match requests with what they have indexed.  With old fashioned sites that indexing is based on keywords and SEO.  With blogs every page can be indexed with it’s title.  With blogs you can anticipate which questions your target might ask and write the answers.

• Increasingly search engines are interested in quality, fresh content.  If we keep feeding them what they want, they’ll keep sending us people who’ve asked the very questions we’ve answered.  There can’t be warmer leads than these.

• Blogging creates a level playing field.  Smaller businesses can’t compete with big ones in traditional media, or even Adwords.  With blogs every page is created equal. Genuine insight will triumph over marketing muscle and spend every time, once the search engines know where to find it.

• With blogging location is irrelevant.  We don’t need to commute to expensive city center offices to get found.  We’re always there, even if we’re in the backwoods enjoying a new lifestyle.  With blogging everybody plays on the world stage.

• It’s Free and it’s Easy.  Go to Blogger and sign up.  Within five minutes you can have a page published.  For more sophisticated tools go to Wordpress.  There are more tools to learn, but it’s still free and simple once you’ve learned how to use it.  Even simpler is Posterous.  You don’t even need to sign up.  Just email your post to post@posterous.com and within minutes you’ll receive a link to your blog post.

Once a business has a blog it can direct people to quality, insight full articles and let them choose what’s interesting.

Once that blog is indexed search engines will match the content with people looking for it.

Once people have found it they’ll be able to come back whenever they’re interested.  They can even subscribe to the RSS feed so new content gets delivered direct to their reader.

Once the blog has a following it becomes a platform for “permission marketing” to people interested in buying what the business is selling.

Too good to be true?

Not at all, but there’s still no gain without pain.

Somebody has to learn to write interesting stuff, and keep doing it.

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• Business Blog Value Exceeds a Website (startupprofessionals.com)

July 31st, 2009 - Posted in Business Internet  |  Add a Comment