Blogging — Funny Name, Great for Online Marketing

EDITOR’S NOTE: This week’s tip is courtesy of Olivier Travers.

What Is Blogging?

Weblogs (also called web logs, or blogs for short) have drawn a fair amount of attention during the last few months. Although everyone has their own definition, I’ll try to come up with what looks like common ground: weblogs are live online journals — frequently-updated web sites where commentary and links are sorted in chronological order, starting from the most recent entries. Most weblogs belong to a community of interest, where comments and cross-links fly from site to site. Blogging, then, is the act of recording entries in a weblog.

A Web Site Is Like Fish: It Stinks When It’s Stale

Although much has been said about the pace of “Internet Time,” it is still clear that it takes more normal time to turn a prospect into a customer or a prototype into a product, no matter what channel you sell and deliver through. On the other hand, the Internet is unique for its timeliness, a quality that is very well embodied by the weblog format — if there’s an idea, event, or promotion you want to let the world know about, you can publish it on your weblog in an instant.

A weblog, where every entry is time-stamped, will change the way you think about the Web. You’ll switch from a one-time design process mindset to one that’s more continuous. If people in your organization start the day asking themselves, “How can I use our web site to do more business today?”, you’ll already be halfway to providing more value to your prospects and clients.

Speak In A Personal Voice And Align Action with Intention

There has been a strong case for more humane communications between companies and their customers (see Cluetrain). Weblogs, most often written in the first person by people you know the name of (as opposed to “the customer service team”), project a more truthful and engaged image.

If you choose to “expose” yourself through a weblog, be aware of the ramifications it could have within your organization. The people in the trenches (those writing online, or picking the phone at the call center) need to be helpful and empowered to respond to customers. If they’re not, you’ll end up aggravating and turning customers away instead.

It Takes Threads To Build A Web

Many corporate sites have hardly any outgoing links, and the outside world likewise mostly ignores these sites as well. On the other hand, weblogs acknowledge there’s a whole world out there, and they strive to leverage external content instead of ignoring it. Embracing this philosophy is important when considering implementing a weblog.

Engaging Your Audience Will Build Organic Traffic Growth

With an ever-fresh web site that lives in synch with your marketing campaigns, something strange is going to happen. Traffic that you had a hard time building, no matter how much money you threw promoting your URL, is now growing by itself. People that used to visit your site for a few seconds and left never to come back, now visit on a recurring basis — they even recommend your site to their friends and peers, bringing in more free traffic.

Expanding Your Reach

If you get into regular publication, it should be easy enough to expand your reach with several distribution channels beside your web site. One is e-mail: Davenetics is a good example of a daily e-newsletter that you can also read on the Web. Another option to consider is syndication: the RSS format lets you publish your headlines in a way that’s easy to aggregate and republish on other sites. Yes, that’s even more traffic you don’t have to pay for!

OK, So How Do I Do It?

1.)Pick up the right tools - weblogs have been strongly promoted by the people that provide tools to manage them, such as Userland’s Dave Winer or Pyra’s Evan Williams. The products made by Winer - server software Frontier and Manila, and the powerful but hard-to-grasp Radio Userland - appeal to people that are interested in how technical things work. Pyra on the other hand focused on browser-based weblog management with Blogger, a web application similar to Manila but a little easier to use by the layman.

These two companies (as well as a few other less-known tools) have a lot in common though. Run by small but dedicated teams, they strongly lowered the barrier to entry in what is called a Content Management System (CMS). Their mostly free products solve problems formerly addressed either with custom development that required technical acumen, or by expensive dedicated systems, the most (in)famous among them being Vignette.

2) It’s still about good content - because weblogs, by their very format, can turn quite easily into less than captivating ramblings and chit-chat, rather than trying to look cool and friendly, you need to remain focused on providing useful or entertaining content that your audience will enjoy. Don’t build a weblog just because they’re trendy; only do so if you find how you can use it to cater to the needs of your customers.

3) Don’t bite more than you can chew - it takes commitment to update a site with worthwhile content on an almost daily basis. Before you create expectations, make sure you’ll be able to fulfill them. You might want to try to feed a trial weblog for a few weeks to see if you can sustain a healthy rhythm before you go public.

To ease the burden of management, some weblogs have several contributors, while others such as Metafilter or Kuro5hin rely on user-submitted content. While a collaborative weblog managed by a few people isn’t too difficult to run, don’t underestimate the amount of monitoring and moderating it takes to sustain the communities that let all visitors post, lest conversations turn into deafening noise. Teamwork can lead to good results if attention is given to coordination between members. It can even become great when you accept to extend your team outside of your company’s boundaries.

4) Keep it brief - if you are to believe usability guru Jakob Nielsen, writing on the Web should be short and contained. Similarly, most weblogs provide short pieces of content that can be read as independent nuggets of information. Short posts should also be easier to produce, but you need to take into account the time required to find good links and put them in context for your readers.

A Few Last Words

The best publishing format won’t do any good if your content is worthless or lacks direction. Whatever the tools you choose, remember they’re just a means to an end. Weblogs can give a boost to corporate sites that often lack the very stuff that makes the Internet what it is: timely, topical, focused, and open for all to see. Finding something worthy of writing about is a challenge that still remains up to you!

Olivier Travers works as an Internet Analyst from his home in Bordeaux, France. He writes and consults on online strategy and marketing issues, and publishes his own weblog at Web Voice.

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