| What’s the value in creating a corporate blog?by Steve Lionais |
Some of the most visited websites on the Internet are blogs like The Drudge Report, Techcrunch, PerezHilton, and Gawker. If you follow the links you’ll see that they range in topic from politics to celebrity gossip. Lately many corporations and brands have gotten on board the blogging train and are creating and writing blog entries for their target consumers.
So why is it that everyone seems to be blogging? Essentially the barriers to entry are as low as they come. All you need is access to a computer, an Internet connection and commonly available (and free) blogging software like Blogger, Wordpress, Moveable Type, and LiveJournal. Anyone can start a blog and they can write about anything they want.
Enter, corporate, branded, product, etc blogging. There are some great business advantages that can be had from a corporate blog. Typically the biggest reason is that search engines love blogs. Yup – blogs are the perfect fodder for search engines because they contain new content for the site, they’re updated regularly, often they’re full of timely and relevant keywords, and if they’re good they’ve got lots of links pointing to them. All of which helps your site rank higher with the search engines.
If you are considering creating a corporate blog, here’s a recipe for making it successful:
Provide regular updates
The more often you update your blog the more likely you are to develop a strong and regular reader base. This will also encourage search engines to visit your site and index it more often and this will improve your search rankings. The most successful blogs are updated multiple times each day, but I’d recommend a daily (weekdays) blog update.
Write about topics of interest to your target audience
Relevance is the key. To develop an interested base of readers you’ll need to appeal to your target audience. No rocket science here, as a marketer you already get this.
Create debate or controversy
Controversial topics will always generate more interest and user feedback than vanilla topics. You’ll most certainly find that articles with the most comments are those that address hot button issues. Of course you’ll have to balance the need for comments & debate with your brand image.
Moderate comments, but don’t sensor them
User comments are a good thing. It’s free content for your website and helps add to the relevance and interest of the blog. Negative comments shouldn’t be removed, not only do they make for interesting reading, but users who read your blog want it to be ‘real’ and if they feel like you’re editing the thoughts of the community you’ll lose reader interest.
Use target keywords when writing your posts
Take advantage of the content you’re creating by seeding your posts with your brand’s targeted keywords. It’ll help your search results
Syndicate your blog
Most blog sites and software have an RSS feed built in. You can share this feed with popular sites on the Internet to help generate more traffic on your site. Submit your feed to My Yahoo, My MSN, and My AOL services. Also list your blog with aggregation sites like Technorati, Feedburner, and Blogrush. Additionally, Feedburner will be able to provide you with some tools to see how many users are subscribed to your blog.
OneWeb CMS 5.1 now offers blog syndication