High Tech Blogging: Why?
Diana Huff recently wrote on whether or not a small business should start a blog. (She is also offering a teleclass on the subject on March 11.) Her conclusion is that not every company needs a blog. I agree, but in high tech there are three good reasons to consider creating a blog - as long as you can commit to creating content (more on that below).
1. Help People Find You
Yes, this has to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If gaining business from a web presence is important to you and you want SEO on the cheap - create a blog, populate it with well thought out keywords and churn out the content. I don’t pretend to know all the reasons why it works, but I can say the following. We transitioned some of our educational content from our old web site to our blog. The content on the blog showed up on the first page of a Google search while the same content on our web site was buried. We didn’t do anything special - just put it on WordPress.
2. Give You Something To Talk About
Keeping the sales pipeline full is a challenge. And going back to prospects is an up-at-dawn-pride-swallowing siege. The best way to keep communications going with prospects is to give them something new. A blog gives you just that - fresh content to put in newsletters and to link to in those random follow up e-mails.
3. Tell The Story Your Way
High tech is filled with innovative products, new ways to attack old problems and visionary thinking. To cut through the noise in the marketplace, you need as many conduits as you can get to tell your story. Traditionally, these conduits have consisted of industry and financial analysts and trade and business press. Now we have new media - blogging and blogger relations. If industry opinion and mind share is important to you, blogging is another way to influence them. (Here’s a good article on how a couple of companies handled crises communications with bloggers.)
BTW, if #3 is important to you, but you are terrified by the commitment of writing a couple of times a week, see our blog entry "The Blogosphere: You Don’t Have to Blog to Belong", which describes how to participate in online conversations without an actual blog.
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February 26th, 2008 at 6:09 am
I designed a site for a local client, and even though his business is not the most exciting in the world, I’m going to add a blog to his site particularly for reason #1 that you specified - there are lots of related keywords I’d like to target, but couldn’t on the main site.
Hopefully I’m thinking there might be other good uses for the blog, over time.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Thanks for reading, Paul. We just transitioned our corporate web site to WordPress, too.
Jeff
February 26th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Jeff — I’ve been thinking of the whole “blogging is good for SEO” idea and I have to say that starting a blog merely to target keywords really bothers me. If a company can’t develop a good Website that includes educational content (articles, white papers, case studies, etc.) optimized for search engines, then the company really shouldn’t start a blog.
It’s the *content* that’s important, not keywords.
However, I do agree that search engines like blogs — but you can achieve the same thing with a Website. You have to regularly add content. That’s why SEs like blogs.
February 26th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Diana-
I agree you have to have good content (and keywords have to be relevant). Perhaps I have #1 and #3 reversed in order of importance?
I’d hope people will eventually like my stuff for what it is, but they have to find me to like me and SEO is a tool toward that end.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I really appreciate it and good luck with your teleclass.
-Jeff
February 27th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Jeff — Your post inspired a newsletter article — and I included a link to this post in it. You really provided a thought provoking question!
February 27th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Great. Thanks. I just subscribed.
-Jeff