Inner Circle Media

Yes, you’ve heard the hype about blogs, but does your business really NEED one? This blog explains why blogs are important and how they might bring big benefits to your company or nonprofit.

But first, some background… This was an interesting assignment for me because while I’ve worked for technology companies for over 10 years, I’m not too familiar with blogs. I know about software development, the Web, technical writing, project management, nerdy workplace tech speak like “WYSIWYG” and “project scope creep.” I’ve tried to keep up with my 16 year old by using DVR and my Razor phone. I know about MP3, Bluetooth, and making sure I don’t become a CrackBerry addict or get phished! But I’m worried that perhaps I’ve ignored the hype about blogs. Blogs have been around awhile— but aren’t they for Generation Y and Z people who worship MySpace and have more time than sense to write about what Brangelina is up to and the latest Harry Potter spoilers? I needed to figure out what the big deal was. What I found was more compelling than the thought of purchasing a new Iphone.

Communicating Via Blogs Means Business…

Simply put, blogs can be:

1. An effective way to communicate with your potential and current customers: A blog is an informal, easily-maintained method for you to talk with your customers. In your blog posts, you can address your customers’ pressing needs, desires, questions, or concerns in a relaxed way. You can also casually talk about how your offerings might solve their problems, and you can position yourself as a trusted resource regarding trends in your industry.
2. An informal method to communicate with your employees: A blog lets your employees share and contribute information in one, common, easily updateable, quickly correctable, web-based location. A blog might replace your staff newsletter. A blog might also help you communicate standard company practices or allow your employees to share their expertise. (I studied ICM’s previous blog posts to get clued in on how to write this!) A blog is also a good way for potential employees to get to know your company’s “personality” and determine if they might want to work on your team.
3. A great way to attract search engine attention and site traffic: Your blog posts and any user-submitted comments are sure to contain a plethora of keywords and phrases that will help you achieve better ranking in the search engines. For example, we wrote some blog posts that contained the phrase “revamp your website.” This is an informal way to describe one of the services we provide to clients, and we don’t use this phrase on our company website; however, when we used the phrase in our blog, we found that it was a popular search term, and when people searched for ways to revamp their websites in Google, they found our blog.
4. An intrinsic tool for linking campaigns: Incoming and outgoing links contribute to your rank in the search engines. In your blog, you should include links to your own website. It’s also important to use reciprocal links to the websites and blogs of your business allies, collaborators, and partners. You should link to any media sites (newspapers, TV shows, portals, etc.) that mention you or your company. By the way, our client, The Accent Reduction Institute (www.lessaccent.com), was recently featured on the NBC Nightly News
5. A way to stay ahead of the competition: Check your competitor’s websites and blogs to see what important topics they’re discussing. You may learn from their latest trials and tribulations. You’ll also determine how to write blog posts that differentiate your company from other companies like yours. For example, while there are many web companies in Ann Arbor, we’ve utilized our blog to set ourselves apart – as a fun, creative woman-owned IT company; as a group of experts who want to share our knowledge so businesses and organizations of any size can benefit; and as a company that LISTENS to our clients’ needs and creates websites that meet those needs in the most appropriate, innovative, and cost-effective ways.

Now you have a little taste of what it’s all about—start empowering your company to communicate in the Blogosphere!

As promised, here’s a follow up to last month’s experiment with Google Hot Trends. In my previous post, I explained how Hot Trends let’s you see what terms people are currently searching for on the web - which can be helpful to your search engine optimization efforts because if you know what people are looking for online, you can tailor your website content and blog posts to their interests.

On June 9th, folks were searching for all sorts of terms; I chose to focus on two terms - “tree with purple flowers” and “Spanish port.” I wrote about these terms in my blog post and then tracked our web statistics to see if those terms drew increased traffic to our site and blog. Indeed, we saw increased traffic. Out of the top 10 search phrases, 3 of them were related to “tree with purple flowers” and “Spanish port.” That’s all fine and dandy, but my experiment begs a few questions:

1. Will your site get more traffic if you talk about the terms listed in Hot Trends? Yes it probably will, but…

2. Is it the TARGETED traffic you want from people who actually care about your products, services, or organization? No, not if you’re a web and multimedia company talking about purple flowers, which have nothing to do our customers’needs or pains.

3. OK, so how can I use Hot Trends to write relevant site content and blog entries and hopefully get better search engine ranking? Here’s how:

On Friday, June 29, 2007, several of the top 100 keyphrases in Hot Trends were related to Facebook (the online social networking hub). That day Facebook suffered a lot of extended downtime, and people were searching the web to figure out what was going on and why they couldn’t access one of their favorite sites. I could use this search trend to my advantage by writing about a related topic as follows:

1. I could write about building an online community (using Facebook, Myspace, and a bazillion other examples). I could talk about how to plan, create, and market that community, and point out the importance of making sure that community is secure, not filled with spam, and scalable.

2. OR I could write an edgier post about how Facebook (and others like it) seem more like popularity contests than real “communities” where people connect deeply, care about each other, fight for a common cause, and strive to improve the world around them.

Either way, these posts (both of which I may write in the near future) would benefit our company and our search engine ranking because they would speak to the needs of my company’s target audience (organizations who want to build and/or improve their own online communities) AND they would also help position me as an expert in my field AND they would be relevant to the terms people are searching on Google. Sounds like a win-win-win to me