Internet Marketing & Blogs… Is it really necessary?

The answer to this question is not ambiguous … Yes!!!  If you want to know why and how, I invite you to please read on.

If you are interested in a successful website and a successful website equals quality internet marketing and includes search engine optimization, conversion optimization, blogs should be an essential part of the overall website marketing approach.

If you are a frequent reader of new content on our website articles page, http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/new-articles/ and our blog (http://sem-blog.optimum7.com/ ) you can see that we “eat our own cooking.”  Moreover, what many of the articles and other web pages speak about is how absolutely essential it is to provide a steady stream of great content both site-mapped on your website but also for wide distribution through syndication via the many online publishing portals.  

Blogging is an intuitively natural way to provide this consistent stream of online content.  How many key employees and / or leaders do you have within your organization?  Do you think they are learning anything new every day?  Do you value their input?  I would imagine the answer to these questions is quite affirmative.  You now have identified your sources of content for your website blog.  

You or the leaders in your company need to encourage, even require, your key people to “blog” by simply answering a simple question:  What did I learn today?  This can be a new technique or process or a new insight from their perspective.  It can be financial, technical, customer support, sales and marketing.  It can be about a new product or a new application.  It can be about a client interaction.  It can be related to the news of the day.  All have a point of view.  If just 3 of your key people supplied 300 words each with their own blog post every day, you will be fulfilling one of the most basic needs toward achieving meaningful online visibility.  Interested readers will come back time and time again.  You can establish an RSS feed to insure these visits as new content becomes available.  In addition, bookmarking and social bookmarking will help to bring your search engine rankings higher and higher as the Google Spiders will rate your site consistently higher in direct proportion to the consistent stream of fresh, relevant content.

Implementation

There are really only 2 recommendations as to how to actually implement a success blog based on the philosophy I have described; one technical and one management.

• Make sure that the blog location or address is contained with your domain i.e. sem-blog.yourdomain.com … not outside of your domain i.e. www.sem-blog.com/yourcompanyname. This insures proper indexing by the Google Spiders. Proper indexing insures that your blog pages are getting the credit it deserves by all of the search engines.
• Assign a “BlogMaster” – this is someone who receives all blog material before it is posted for proofreading and final review/approval to insure that the material is appropriate, relevant and otherwise suitable for public consumption.

Blogging is a great way to take advantage of your most creative and thoughtful employees.  The blog can be a free and open forum of providing and exchanging ideas and opinions from multiple viewpoints.  You can define the criteria any way you wish.  It can be a great way to encourage “out of the box” thinking and ideas.  It's also a great way to encourage healthy competition by your most committed employees.  You will find your new bloggers trying to outdo each other with better and better ideas over time.  What a great way to keep the creative juices flowing.

I only have one DON'T.  DON'T STOP.  As important as content is, it is also equally important to emphasize the steady stream requirement as I worded it earlier.  An active website is a successful website.  As the spiders take notice of your consistent new and updated content, they will “deep crawl” your website more and more frequently.  This improves your search engine visibility; yes, you will be doing your own form of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) … one of the most powerful components of Internet Marketing.

The raw material for your website blog already exists.  Your website is there for a defined purpose.  If you are looking to gain prominence, be more relevant and more visible, look no further than your own people and start blogging today.