Ad Age Digital has a post by B.L. Ochman entitled “10 Reasons Your Company Shouldn’t Blog”. I am not sure that I entirely agree with the premise of this article…

The top 10 reasons I tell companies not to blog are:

1. The blogs most companies want to create are guaranteed to join the 900,999 out of every million blogs with no readers. Why? They’re boring.

Of course a business blog can be boring. It’s because most of the people writing for these businesses do not know what to write about. It is also very likely that the writer does not spend any time talking to the customers and prospects. Every customer contact has within it the seed of a blog post, whether we are addressing a concern that the customer shared, or a success story.

2. A blog has to have a personal voice. If you sound like a corporate drone, nobody will read your blog.

See the answer to the above.

3. You need original content. The blogosphere is too much of an echo chamber already. What can you add that/s original? Or significantly better than anything else in your niche?

Of Course You’re Better, That is Why You Are Doing This

Well, now, let’s not rain on everyone’s parade. We have discussed this already as well. In fact, there is an immediately accessible wealth of source material for blog posts:

Blog Topics for Business Development

* Write about the expertise of our business
* Write about the capabilities of our employees
* Use a video to demonstrate exactly how our product works
* Use the power of links and references by other writers to prove facts and data
* Let our customers tell their own success stories using our solutions

We can also write about our market and business environment. Not specifically about our business, but about the world our business and our customers live in.

Blog Topics for Community Development

* Write about current events in the industry
* Feature interviews with innovators in the field
* Point to news articles about key players in the industry
* Write reviews of newsletters and other blogs in the industry
* Embed podcasts and videos of relevant information
And this list is just for starters!

4. Blogging takes time — lots of it. Let’s even say a CEO is a great writer, who enjoys researching and crafting posts. And let’s say he or she will write about what people want to hear about and not just write about what the company wants to say. And they he/she is willing to update a few times a week. All of that takes anywhere from two to four hours a post.

Blogging takes a lot of time? What part of being a CEO does not take a lot of time? I believe that many CEOs find the time to golf (and network on the golf course). The beauty of blogging (and the internet in general) is its 24-hour-a-day nature. We can write blog posts on Saturday morning and publish them automatically on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Remember, this is time that we are investing in our business. There is a return on the investment!

5. You need to read constantly to be a good blogger. That includes blogs, but also media outside the blogosphere — feeds, forums, mainstream media — so you can keep your readers informed about your topics.

This point really bothers me. Of course you need to read to be a good blogger. You need to read constantly to be a good business person.

6. A blog is not a substitute for a marketing campaign. It is simply a potential part of corporate communications.

7. A blog is not a substitute for advertising — if you need to fill a new hotel, or sell a product by a certain date, advertise.

8. A blog is not a quick fix — the results come in the long term, the same way they do with PR.

A blog is no substitute for legacy media companies and their PR campaigns. That is correct. A blog won’t charge you $1,000s of dollars to tell you what your customers are saying about you. A blog is a fast, inexpensive, and highly effective way to increase your internet presence to drum up more business.

9. Blogs are not cheap. A good one requires skilled programming to set it up, a professional graphic designer to make it part of your corporate identity, a talented and dedicated writer or editor, full-time.

You can get a very professional-looking blog for free on Blogger or WordPress.com. Both of these are good places to get started and learn the basics. When you are ready, it is a very simple matter to migrate the blog to your own site. Don’t fall for the hype, believe me, it is not that expensive. In fact, I’d be glad to help you with it, let me know what your budget is, and we’ll talk.

10. You need to drive traffic to a blog. There are many ways to do that. All of them require time, effort and money. Ways to drive traffic to a corporate blog include:

* Advertising on blogs, where you can be incredibly niche specific and cost-effective; buying Google keywords; and including your URL in traditional and online advertising.
* Promotion — you can drive traffic to a blog with skillful promotion though other blogs, by becoming a respected part of social networking communities frequented by your customers; with contests, viral marketing, and the use of a variety of Web 2.0 promotional methods discussed frequently here and in other blogs that cover social media marketing.

Driving traffic to a blog does require time and effort. Money helps, but buying ads is not always the best way to get noticed and attract those eyeballs. Digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us can have a much larger impact on your traffic than an ad campaign.

Stay tuned for more posts on this topic, and let us know if you have any specific questions to address in the Comments.

(Above image from Chris & Lara Pawluk‘s Flickr page)

Be Sociable, Share!

•