Several years ago, I used to get a subscription to a computer magazine that wasn’t the most interesting reading I usually did, but it would keep me up to date on new computing information. There was an editorial about a very new application called a weblog (better known as a blog) and I remember thinking that this seemed like the most pointless form of communication since anyone could (and would) post all their thoughts. It sounded like an uninteresting diary from non-writers – not something I wanted to constantly read. I wasn’t swayed from this opinion when this application started to be used by some “first adopters”. It was mainly just boring recounts of these people’s days and as a general rule – “first adopters” don’t often live the most exciting life to write about every day.

Even more recently, I was turned off by blogs – I just didn’t see the use of getting information from people about their personal lives or about their opinions on world affairs. But just like web pages evolved from their first generation of home pages that people created about themselves, so did blogs. More recently, I found some great information. There were some technical resources I read that I really enjoyed and as I was looking for more information, their blogs became a great source of information.

From there, I realized that there were some more inherent benefits than just what we see on the surface.

It’s an EXCELLENT way to communicate with your customers and prospects. You establish yourself as a trusted resource with useful ideas.

You can get new business and traffic organically. While I won’t dive into the technical reasons, a blog is a great way to get more potential prospects to your blog and web site. Search Engines love all the content on blogs and will provide potential for visitors searching for information that you right about. There is also traffic from other blogs that link to your site.

It’s a precursor to a newsletter. If you don’t have a newsletter already, you’re missing out but that’s a topic for another day. However, if you want to send out a newsletter (e-mail or regular mail), you can take some of the topics from your blog entries to send out in your newsletter. You take some of your best topics and just paste it into a newsletter and you don’t have to spend additional time coming up with content.

Great source to provide information to clients. I’ve had a few occasions already where I directed some prospects to the blog to read information about a topic. It’s often much more convenient to refer clients to a link about a topic instead of trying to write it extemporaneously and send it in an e-mail.

If you need any help setting up a blog, give us a call and we can get you publishing in now time.

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