Benefits of Corporate Blogging

by Avneet

Top Reasons why a business should have a corporate blog:

The blogosphere has been growing at a very fast pace over the past couple of years. As of September 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 106 million blogs.

There are a several important reasons why you should consider having an active Corporate blog as a part of your Online Marketing Strategy. Some of the prominent reasons are listed below.

a. Blogging helps tremendously in SEO: When you put up a post on your blog, you end up creating a separate webpage on your website, which becomes a good candidate for ranking for some keywords. So over a period of time, as you become more and more active on the blog, you end up creating a lot of webpages on your site with good content, which can possibly rank high for some keywords.

Each well written blog post is a candidate for ranking in search engines, over time. So blog posts, with good content, can get you good rankings in search engines and thereby drive traffic to your site.

b. Content Delivery Mechanism: Blogs use a special delivery mechanism to push the content to the viewers. This is called RSS or XML. As a user, there are a few ways of reading or keeping yourself updated on your favorite blogs. One way is to go to the blog and read the content there – this is the typical method that most of the people follow. The second is that you subscribe to the “feed” of that blog and get the blog delivered to your computer / online account.

How do you do this?

For this you first require a Feed Reader a.k.a. Feed Aggregator. There are plenty of them available for free. Latest versions of browsers like Opera, Firefox etc. also come inbuilt with feed readers now). Once you install these on your computer or subscribe to the web based feed readers, you can subscribe to your favorite blogs and get their latest posts, without having to visit these blog sites every day. Something similar to downloading emails on your email client.

A lot of times you might not be able to visit your favorite sites, just because you just don’t get the time. But if you are subscribed to their RSS feeds or blog feeds (if they provide them), then you can come to know about any additions on these blogs automatically, without having to visit these sites. This saves me tons of time.

More and more people are now using these feed readers to get updated. You can subscribe to the Feeds offered by Cue Blog by clicking on the different feed options given on the right navigation side of our blog.

So anytime you have a new blog post on your corporate blog, announcing a new product, or a new offering, or a new discount etc. you don’t have to worry about missing out on letting the people know. The moment you put up a post on your blog, all the people who are subscribed to your blog’s RSS feed, would come to know instantly about it.

If your blog does not offer different feed options, you are missing out on very important delivery mechanism which can make a big difference in your blog’s visibility.

c. Listing in Specialized Search Engines: Apart from Google, Yahoo and Live (now called Live.com), a lot of other search engines are gaining in popularity. These are not general search engines like the above 3, but these deal only with blogs or RSS enabled sites/content only. Examples include:

Technorati
Bloglines
Sphere
IceRocket
Blogscope
Google Blogsearch

So if you DO NOT have a blog or a RSS enabled section on your website, your site CANNOT become part of these search engines and you will be devoid of the traffic potential of these search engines.

The moment you have a blog and it is set up right, these search engine index your blog and announce to the rest of the world about the posts on your blog, whenever people are searching for related keywords.

d. Content Flux: Blogs allow you to add content to your site in a much faster method. Usually websites have new content added only at different intervals – when a new product or article is getting added, or some new service is being introduced etc. So unless you have a strong content writing plan, your site does not see a lot of content based pages getting added to the site. So the main site’s content addition, in a way, becomes a formal and slow affair.

In a blog however, you can put up content related to any of the topics which you like. This increases the content flux on your website – which is a good sign for Search Engines.

So when you become active on your blog, you are adding more and more content rich text to your site. Sometimes there could be blog posts which are not very content rich and could only be of 2 to 3 lines (which is fine as long as they are meaningful) – but these too would help you in some way.

e. Branding: When you have an active blog, your prospective customers are also influenced in a positive manner. They can see your thought process, make a connection with the company and thereby build more trust with that company. It helps tremendously in branding.

f. Linking: An active blog gets linked from other blogs very openly. The blogsphere is very open in linking to each other (this is not very common in typical websites). So you increase your chances of getting inbound links, once you make your blog active.

To get the maximum benefit of a blog, it is imperative to have it installed in one of the directories of your website – eg. Yourdomain.com/blog.

Since the blog is residing on the main site and “not” on any other third party site like typepad or blogger etc. these links that will point to our blog, would eventually benefit the complete website. So the benefits trickle down to other sections of the site as well.

# Getting started with blogging: This is perhaps the first and most critical step. One shouldn’t get caught up in what to blog and what not – and aim at making the perfect blog posting at all times. Of course you will follow some general guidelines for blogging, but beyond that it is commonly said in blogging that – Anyone who can write an email can blog!

# Promote your Blog: You should also have your blog URL mentioned on your business cards, print material, company letter pad, email signatures etc. so that it gets good visibility as well.

CueBlocks offers extensive custom blog design and blog makeover services. Contact us now to get a custom blog design for your website. We provide active blogging consulting and advice as well.