MARKETING BLOG

MARKETING • TECHNOLOGY • RESULTS

Short answer: yes. Starting a blog is really quite simple. In fact, it is so simple you can literally have one up and running in a matter 5 minutes or less! Well, sort of. If you don’t care about branding and you don’t care about a private domain, 5 minutes may actually be about 4 minutes too long. Don’t believe it? A quick visit to blogger and you’ll see the proclamation: It’s easy, and only takes a minute!

So, why start a blog? Here’s a pretty good list of reason’s for starters: Top 10 Reasons to Start a Blog. For our technology clients, I recommend a blog as a great way to express thought leadership. And while whitepapers and case studies are great vehicles as well, blogs provide a lot more latitude in expressing onself as they can be a lot less formal, and they are bi-directional.

I do find it odd however that the article above fails to point out the importance of blogs to one’s SEO strategy. Blogs enable you to attract search engines with content and topicality that may not exactly fit on your corporate web site, yet deliver link juice through contextually relevant links. For example; imagine for a moment that you run a marketing agency that is located in the Philadelphia area. You can easily provide a link from your blog entries back to your Philadelphia marketing agency web site.

So, if you are serious about starting your blog, what are some of the key considerations you should be aware of?

1. Choosing a platform - In a just a few minute of search, you will find hundreds of options. Yikes! Just what you need when you are just getting started right? My recommendation… stick with the more reputable and proven platforms. Here’s a good article that reviews 10 of the more popular (installs) blog engines.
2. Hosting - do you have the wherewithall (or desire) to install and host a blog platform? You’ll need access to a server and the technical abilities to setup and install the neccessary software. Free hosted plaforms such as Wordpress.com and Blogger.com take all of the hastle out of setting up a blog. Your only real challenge here is grafting your visual identity onto the blog, which will require the services of someone skilled in design, CSS and HTML. Keep in mind, should you choose one of the free hosted solutions, you may run into issues down the road should you decide to move to another platform. Porting blog entries, while possible is riddled with challenges.
3. Capabilities - blogging may not be all you want to do; more mature blog platforms offer additional plugins for advanced functionality ranging from polling, forms, stock tickers and you name it. If you are like most, your primary interest is simply blogging and to that extent any of the more popular engines will more than suffice.

But when you really get down to it, starting a blog and choosing a good platform will ultimately be the easiest part for most companies. Updating it and maintaining it is by far the bigger challenge. While I haven’t been the most diligent at doing that here, I have plenty of ideas on how to make the process more manageable for our clients. It takes time and commitment but the benefits are numerous… it’s like the gift that keeps on giving.

Over the years, Vovéo has done a lot of marketing work for b-to-b technology companies. One of the reason’s we’ve been so successful is our ability to take a complex product or service offering and distill it down to a few simple concepts that the average business person can understand and appreciate. I often find myself in the same position when offering SEO services. Clients hear a lot about it - and believe they need it, but generally don’t understand the concepts involved. So here is a simple analogy of how search works.

Google and other search engines perform a service, and not unlike other service businesses, their reputation depends on how well they do so. Their goal is to satisfy each search request with the most credible, or “relevant” information thereby ensuring the loyalty and satisfaction of their customers.

Finding the most relevant web page is a lot like finding anything else. Imagine for a moment you are walking the streets of your favorite city, shopping for an engagement ring. The first thing you might look for would be a sign such as “Jeweler”. On the web, a storefront sign is somewhat analogous to a page title. If you were in Philadelphia, you might wonder over to Sansom street, otherwise known as Jeweler’s Row - street addresses are analogous to URLs on the web. Once you had identified a potential jewelry store, you would most likely look in the window and peek at some of the inventory - i.e. meta description. Somewhat convinced you’d found a reasonable place to buy a ring, you probably enter the store to have a further look.

Once inside the store, you’d begin to look around for additional signs - i.e. heading tags. At some point, you may even ask a store clerk for assistance or directions - i.e. internal links to the ring section. Once you had located the rings, you begin to look through the inventory - or content. OK, so now that you are properly oriented, you can get down to the business of purchasing a ring, right? Wrong! Choosing an engagement ring is a big decision. How do you know that you’ve found a credible jeweler - one that will sell you the highest quality engagement ring at the best possible price and support you after you’ve made the purchase? Simple, you check references - i.e. inbound links. As the opinions roll in, you begin weighing them - assigning high value to those received from credible sources - i.e. high page rank, and progressively lower value to others. Properly armed with all of the necessary information, you proceed to make the right decision… and break off your engagement.

So there you have it. In practice, SEO is more involved than this article would illustrate, but the concepts are really quite simple. Google and other search engines seek to find the most relevant information they can, your goal is to give them the information they need to make that determination.