Business Blogging: Fad or the Future?
Larix Consulting Newsletter, July 2004

Blogging Renaissance

Blogs are experiencing a renaissance lately. If you're not familiar with blogs here's the short explanation. Blogs (short for weblogs) were developed as an online diary or journal about five years ago. Bloggers, as they are commonly known, would post entries on their blogs on what ever topic the blog was about or just whatever. This lead to the popular notion that blogs were mostly drivel. That was five years ago, flash forward to 2004 and now blogs are quickly becoming one of the ways for information to be shared on the Internet. Blogs are being used not only as virtual soapboxes for opinion, but also to release software updates, security information, and press releases. Businesses large and small have started to leverage this powerful publishing platform and saving time and money in the process. Blogging isn't just for geeks anymore, blogging is definitely mainstream.

So what is business blogging?

Business blogging simply refers to companies using blogging technologies to provide customers, potential customers, and other interested people information in a clear, chronological fashion. Posting to a blog is very easy, often through just a web-browser or even via e-mail, so training takes little or no time at all.

How can I use a blog for my business?

Blogs can be used to build your web presence, or augment it. Blogs can power an Intranet or serve as a content and knowledge management system. In essence, blog software is really just a flexible publishing system. You can easily build and create web pages for your site with only a web browser. You might think that blogs are just for public discussions, but they're not. Internal company blogs (behind your firewall) and secure blogs on the Internet are some of the fastest growing areas of blogging. Some popular blogging tools like Blogware have built in, easy to use security that can limit what visitors can read or edit. This article from ClickZ.com really drives the point home: Blogs are for business.

Give me information, and give it to me now!

One of the primary reasons for blogging's recent renaissance has been the development of simple syndication formats (often lumped together as RSS and visible on websites with these icons). These computer-readable webfeeds allow people to subscribe to your blog and when new information is published it is delivered to them automatically. This is not e-mail, this isn't a mailing list, and it isn't spam. It is instant information delivery, and it is powerful. Most people who, like myself, check and read webfeeds use news aggregators (something like a cross between an e-mail client and a web browser) and often check dozens of feeds (I'm up almost 90 myself).

Although news aggregators haven't broken out into the mainstream yet, they are poised to. Apple has announced that Safari will have a built in feed reader next year. Mozilla and Opera already have this feature available. IE does not support it natively, yet, but the plug-in Pluck adds the functionality. If your audience is tech savvy, you can bet they know all about webfeed syndication.

All major blogging packages support publishing webfeeds by default and many allow e-mail subscriptions as well. Webfeeds and syndication gives you the ability to reach your customers instantly, the moment you have published new information.

Search engines love blogs.

If you would like search engines to index your website and associate it strongly with your particular business niche, blogs are the ticket. For example, my own website was indexed by Google almost 2400 times between May 6 (when my statistics start) and July 18! That is just Google and doesn't count MSN and blog specific indexers. Why do search engines like blogs so much? First, content is updated regularly. Second the content is usually focused on a narrow set of topics. This means the same keywords keep coming up associated with your site. Also, an important part of blogging is linking to other online content and other sites and blogs linking to you. Search engines love links as much as they love new content. The more links in and out, the more search engines will index your website. End result: search engines will know about your site and you're your potential visitors or customers will have a good chance of finding you when they search for you.

How to I start?

This is great, I'd like to get started or learn more, but what do I do, you ask. Reply to this e-mail or give me a call. I can demonstrate how the tools work and what options are available.

If you would like to chat about it right now click the button below to chat with me online.