What Your Blog Can Do… and What It Can’t Do
When they first appeared in the late 1990s, blogs were running commentaries of writers’ lives, much like many Twitter and Facebook accounts today. Blogs were seen as one person’s opinion and deemed as little more expert than a diary. Unfortunately, many business people still consider a blog to be a four-letter word: unnecessary and not worthy of investment.
Like most things Internet, however, the blog has evolved and changed. Today, business blog have efficiently replaced the company newsletter in that it can contain news about recent business happenings or convey information on a single subject. Blogs may still contain opinion and commentary, but they are well respected as vehicles for passing along pertinent and sometimes vital communications.
What a Blog Does
Blogs are one of the primary means of communication between professionals today, according to Penn State University. Coupled with technological tools such as RSS feeds, blogs are an inexpensive inclusion in a marketing toolbox. They allow professionals to get their ideas out to their readers easily at little cost. Blogs are short, fact-filled articles that can be sent through email, posted on a website and sent to mobile devices.
The bottom line is that a blog is one of the best vehicles around today to communicate with your audience, whether they are customers, friends or followers. And since most blogs allow comments, the platform gives you an opportunity to connect with that audience, to have an exchange of ideas and to solicit feedback on your services or products.
Blogs vs. Newsletters
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Replace your monthly newsletter with a set of four weekly blog articles (which are called “posts”). You don’t need expensive software to write and publish your posts. Once you have a website, the technology to allow blogs is usually free and quickly learned. Since everyone has a web browser, you don’t have to worry about mailing costs, and since blogs are stored online, you don’t even need a filing cabinet to store your back issues.
Producing a newsletter can be costly. One eight-page monthly newsletter professionally written and laid out can cost you up to $500 a month, and that price only goes up the more clients you have. In other words, newsletter technology doesn’t scale well. Blog posts, on the other hand, can be professionally written and produced for a little as $60 a week. They are much more accessible, and always available, to your clients.
A newsletter requires coordinating multiple articles produced in advance of publication. A blog post, in contrast, can be produced and published on the same day. Even if you post your newsletter to your website, which is always a good idea by the way, adds new content for search engines on a monthly or quarterly basis. While that’s good for search rankings, you can publish a new blog post every week, providing a constant stream of new content and forcing those search engines to re-index your site more frequently.
Blogs Are Better
So forget the old stereotype of what a blog is. It’s gone the way of the www. It’s no longer necessary to produce expensive newsletters. Join the 21st century and jump into the blogosphere. Because it’s not just a good idea; it’s what you need to get noticed. It’s what will set you apart from your competition.
When you’re ready to get started, contact us. We are communication professionals and can offer free advice. Or if you understand the value of a blog, but don’t have the internal resources to create one, can do the writing for you.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.