Why Should Your Company Have A Blog?

I was originally trying to write an email to a friend and realized that it's lengthy and can be used by many other entreprenuers as well and so decided to convert it into a webpage. If you are an aspiring entreprenuer but has limited or no knowledge of the world of blogging and search engine optimization (SEO), read the reasons why you should have an official blog for your company.

1. Random Hits Regular blogging creates more content on your website that potentially contains some of the long-tail of the search keywords (phrases that are less frequently used to search) that brings in some traffic.
2. News RSS and Atom feeds provide an alternate way of aggregating information. Based on the quality of your blogs, people might start subscribing to these feeds and start reading them regularly. Using a service like feedburner, it's possible to track how effective your blog feeds are. Firefox's Sage and Google Reader are other examples of RSS aggregators.
3. Tags Wordpress for example, helps you tag your blogs. With this even people who don't know about your blog or site still can potentially end up visiting your blog and website because, they might be doing research and look at a given tag page that contains all the posts marked with that tag. This generates a bit more traffic to your site. However, don't over tag.
4. Pingbacks When you quote someone else's blog, it ends up as a Pingback to the original blog and your post ends up in their comments section. This also generates a bit more of traffic, but don't over-do this. Do it when there is a real reason why you want to quote the original blog. Also, note that the original blogger can always make your pingback as a spam and you risk blacklisted as a spammer by overdoing it.
5. Freshness Google has a blog search facility. There are other services like Technorati that also allow browsing and searching for content. While the regular web search is all about relevancy and hence difficult to show up on the front page, blog search is all about the "current happenings" and so, anyone can be showing up on the front page! Think of this as your five minutes of fame.
6. Alerts Google Alerts allows you to subscribe for alerts for a given keyword. The alerts can be based on web content, blogs and other types of media. Many people who specialize in a particular area use the Google Alerts system to keep them upto date on the related news. So, a good quality post could end up being read by a highly targeted audience.
7. patrick.net Those of you in the USA and follow the real estate downturn, you probably are aware of patrick.net. Essentially, there are people that are doing constant research to find out the high quality articles and aggregating and publishing them to their readers. So, if your blog post ends up in one of such sites for your topic, then that brings in additional traffic. In addition, some of such linking to your post can also increase your pagerank that helps in better search engine ranking. Note however that there are many websites sprouting up that are aggregating it through automated software rather than manual review process and hence your post might end up at the most inappropriate place. There is nothing much that you can do about this and as long as Google doesn't penalize for your link showing up at a wrong place (as you don't control over who links to you), then you shouldn't be worried about it.

If you are convinced on the benefits from the above reasons, don't just go ahead and start overdoing it. Remember that an official blog acts as a faceless representative of your business. And unlike a regular corporate website, a blog includes thoughts, opinions, analysis and much more. So, be careful on what you blog, how you blog and with a fair use and quality postings, you can get a free marketing agent over a period of time.

These days even the CEOs of big companies are spending time to blog. So should you, the startup entreprenuer!