I’ve discussed the issue of corporate blog neglect.
Blogs often become ghost towns after a few months. It doesn’t just include business blogs either. People get excited about the idea of blogging, but after publishing a few posts the ideas run dry and the effort becomes too taxing to continue. As a result the blog posts become less frequent and eventually time passes and the blog becomes another graveyard of potential.
Recently there was a great column on this exact topic on Inc.com.
Jeremy Dearringer (@Papaslingshot) of Slingshot SEO shared some insight into why it is important to continue writing your corporate blog from the SEO perspective. Jeremy is one of the brightest minds in the SEO world. It’s worth five minutes of your time to check out his article in full. I’ll just share his four reasons why blogging is important for SEO.
From Big Mistake: Neglecting Your Corporate Blog –
- Search engines like to see sites updated regularly
- Enhance rapport with your site visitors (a.k.a. potential clients) by helping them
- Provide a great opportunity for organic links to your site
- Increase your brand’s presence as a thought leader in your industry
I’d like to continue the discussion by adding 4 additional reasons you should continue working on your corporate blog.
4 More Reasons to Maintain a Corporate Blog
1. Provide Something Current Clients Can Share
SEO is a part of the value of blogging. Search engines still send large amounts of free traffic to websites including blogs. This is one way for prospects to discover your brand allowing you to earn their trust and eventually their business. But there is more to blogging than just SEO. Blogging is about referrals. You need something your current customers and subscribers can share with friends, colleagues, and co-workers. Blog content is exactly the type of item someone can email, tweet, or even talk about in real life conversation.
2. Add More Value to Email Newsletters
Email newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with your clients and prospects. It can be difficult to come up with new content for these newsletters (just as it’s tough to create corporate blogging content). Re-purposing blog content into newsletter content and other forms of content is a great way to make the best use of your time. Start by blogging and reuse the content to fill in emails that you send to clients and prospects.
3. Help Clients and Prospects by Interpreting Industry Events and News
Jeremy touched on this with the idea of being a thought leader with a corporate blog. That has great benefit from the SEO perspective and I want to take it a bit further. I’m a big fan of taking industry news and providing perspective and point of view. Most of your customers read the news. It’s not the job of a corporate blog to report the news. The real value you can provide is a point of view on various news topics.
In the SEO and search world it is often Google that gives news about its own updates. People in the industry certainly pay attention, but even more important than these updates are the point of view of the SEO industry leaders like Jeremy.
Your customers want to know how they should react to news. They want your expert opinion that you’ve developed over years of experience. Provide interpretation and you’ll be seen as someone your target customers can trust. And it’s that trust that leads to sales and profit.
4. Provide Vision for Employees and Co-Workers
This one is a little different. Corporate blogs can be written by a variety of people within an organization. I think it’s great when the CEO or owner of the company provides some insight and perspective both for clients (see #3) and employees. It’s a requirement of the CEO to provide vision for the company. This gives employees a bit of a roadmap for the future. They can see how they should work to achieve goals and further themselves and the company. A blog is a great way to do this even if it’s public. Customers like seeing vision as well.
It’s great to be a thought leader in the industry and that includes providing vision for the employees and clients of a company.