Week X Part I: The Personal Experience of Blogging
"If you own a business website without a blog, you’re missing a crucial component of your online marketing strategy."
A bold claim by ClickFirst on their blog "What's the purpose of blogging". Let's take a look – is this seemingly outdated social tool really of any benefit to a business?
The thesis is as follows: people like to share experiences. Creating a piece of copy that people can connect to emotionally raises their affinity to its source. As a business, this can be leveraged through the creation of personalized pieces of content.
So is it appropriate for something as professional as a business to make something so human?
Well, as with most things in the corporate environment, the line is thin, if not totally invisible.
To properly measure results, let's set the context of this discussion in a room full of KPI's: Google Analytics.
Time and time again, it has been proven that providing incredibly valuable content makes people feel more engaged with the source. "For a lot of people, buying online can be a scary thing." So, Google rewards those businesses that provide genuine value to their customers through something as extraneous as a blog. The tech giant wants its users to have the best experience possible, so having consistent and concise content that people love to eat up will result in high rankings on their search engine.
This, unfortunately, can be a rabbit hole. Now that businesses know they can use strategies to rank higher on Google (and therefore increase sales & customer loyalty), they try to take advantage of this system. Keyword-dumping and false blogs have become rampant, a false attempt to fool Google into rewarding an unworthy business. Still, these blogs are unreadable for the everyday consumer, full of random sentence structures and clearly robotic content that was made to be read by a software, not a human being. Eventually, the business suffers when both consumers and Google catch on, leaving them out to dry.
So, as always, honesty seems to be the best policy.
A blog can be an incredibly powerful tool for business owners, if it's done right. Content should be genuine for the user and consistent to keep them captivated.
By the same token, content should be partially crafted by the guidelines of the search engine, sprinkling key words and phrases sparsely throughout.
To take a completely impersonal stance in trying to appease Google is clearly a mistake. To create an additional channel of value for consumers to dive into surely can't hurt.
The question is: what will you do for your online business?
A bold claim by ClickFirst on their blog "What's the purpose of blogging". Let's take a look – is this seemingly outdated social tool really of any benefit to a business?
The thesis is as follows: people like to share experiences. Creating a piece of copy that people can connect to emotionally raises their affinity to its source. As a business, this can be leveraged through the creation of personalized pieces of content.
So is it appropriate for something as professional as a business to make something so human?
Well, as with most things in the corporate environment, the line is thin, if not totally invisible.
To properly measure results, let's set the context of this discussion in a room full of KPI's: Google Analytics.
Time and time again, it has been proven that providing incredibly valuable content makes people feel more engaged with the source. "For a lot of people, buying online can be a scary thing." So, Google rewards those businesses that provide genuine value to their customers through something as extraneous as a blog. The tech giant wants its users to have the best experience possible, so having consistent and concise content that people love to eat up will result in high rankings on their search engine.
This, unfortunately, can be a rabbit hole. Now that businesses know they can use strategies to rank higher on Google (and therefore increase sales & customer loyalty), they try to take advantage of this system. Keyword-dumping and false blogs have become rampant, a false attempt to fool Google into rewarding an unworthy business. Still, these blogs are unreadable for the everyday consumer, full of random sentence structures and clearly robotic content that was made to be read by a software, not a human being. Eventually, the business suffers when both consumers and Google catch on, leaving them out to dry.
So, as always, honesty seems to be the best policy.
A blog can be an incredibly powerful tool for business owners, if it's done right. Content should be genuine for the user and consistent to keep them captivated.
By the same token, content should be partially crafted by the guidelines of the search engine, sprinkling key words and phrases sparsely throughout.
To take a completely impersonal stance in trying to appease Google is clearly a mistake. To create an additional channel of value for consumers to dive into surely can't hurt.
The question is: what will you do for your online business?
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