Why Blog?

Update: This is a pretty old blog post, which through the nature of StumbleUpon has once again become hot, don’t judge us to harshly it was only our third month blogging after all
Its been over 3 months since we started this blog, and in that time we have had some really interesting posts and discussions, on all manner of things including Google Hosted Applications, Drupal, Search engine optimisation, branding and identity. But a question we are asked is bloging worth it?

The answer of course is yes but only if you know why your doing it!
This is a company blog, but you don’t see any huge buy stuff from us advertisement a couple of links to our main site here and there but nothing that say look come buy stuff off us now. This blog is our way of giving back to the community, we use open source tools in our everyday lives and we read the posts of nearly 500 bloggers, it these guys that this blog is for its our way of saying thanks.
Now I know most people are thinking that’s swell a cheque would have been fine but bare with me, this blog has a small but growing readership when we mention sites on the blog they do see traffic increases and like SEO Cornwall, I have for a long time stumbled and added sites that we link to and link to us via del.icio.us as a way of saying thanks. We are not a big company we don’t have multi-million pound accounts and I’m afraid Google is not going to buy us out, actually I take that back I’m glad Google is not going to buy us out.

Now I have answered why we blog I will confess that the way we blog is part of our business model. You have to understand we would be bloggers anyway, indeed we are my blog is here but this blog does help in providing a branding and image, one that is being nurtured. I’m not suggesting anything we say on the blog is in anyway untrue but we do have some serious editorial control, and only 1/5 posts make it up, the death to Bill Gates post was just to horrible to post and the RSPCA (royal society protection of cruelty to animals) would have been round because of the use of hedgehogs. Once a post has been chosen it is then checked against the following;

• Is it relevant to our core competences?
• Is it interesting?
• Would I read it?
• Would you read it?

Now to get onto the blog it needs to reach 3 out of 4 of the above, we are occasionally lax about competences but the others tend to be adhered to.
Now we are a search engine marketing/reputation management company so I’m often asked about how we go about key word placement in our blog posts. I will let you into a secret we don’t!
Write for humans the search engines will follow, this blog gets 1/10 of its traffic from Google, now that may not seem a lot but that 1/10 seems to be pretty targeted a check on the keywords finds us normally in the first 2 or 3 SERP and the posts are normally spot on. So write for humans and the engines will follow mantra works on this blog.

This post is very much a us, us, us post so I want to end with some interesting tips I have picked up in our first 3 months.

• Everybody Loves Google its near perfect Link Bait
• Blog before it happens (if you like a piece of software and no its up for a major release organise your tutorial now!
• Don’t get depressed by no comments or spam, people are still reading.
• Make friends with your readers and let them stumble or Digg your site, in the long run they know what is and isn’t your best content

So with that I say good bye, and hope you will stick with us for the next few months.

If your interested in what we think are some of our best posts of 2006 have a look here

This post was written as part of engtech writing competition (if we win we will give the credits to a non profit wordpress blog to be selected if we win)
Update - We didn’t win but you can read the entries here & a second contest has already started.

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