In the past few weeks, we’ve visited several clients and talked to them about why they should make the plunge and start their own company blog, to support their existing website and regular marketing efforts. Here’s a summary of what I have told them:

A blog is one of the best, cheapest, and easiest ways to build a reputation for yourself while increasing your SEO visibility. Unlike the website which is more structured and takes more work to update, a blog is much more flexible, is super easy to update: you can do posts from your own computer whenever you want, on any subject, with no knowledge of HTML and no software to buy. Your customers can subscribe to it with an RSS feed (this is very easy and is built into the blog software), so that every time you put up a new post, they’ll get a notification of it. So it’s like pushing out a press releases in a way, but without all the work or expense.

You can encourage feedback from customers, colleagues, etc. It’s a fluid, changing thing, intended to encourage dialog and interaction. And it’s full of links that refer back to your website and increase your company’s reputation and google rankings.

I think that blogging is going to continue to become more and more critical to a company’s success, and in some cases, I think a blog may actually be more important than your website because of the search engine visibility: because it changes frequently and is search-engine optimized, you get indexed and found more easily. And also, because it centers around interaction and RSS feeds, your customers become an integral part of your success. And it’s a great way to add a personal, conversational voice to a company’s image, which is much harder to do from a website. When you subscribe or contribute to a blog, you feel like you’re a “member of the community” and that you’re helping build it, which fosters loyalty. It’s not a feeling you ever get from visiting a website.

If you’re still in doubt about blogging for your business, order "Publish & Prosper: Blogging for your Business." It is full of useful and easily digestible information that will convince you that blogging really is the way the web is going.