Today, blogs are everywhere, but do they really help your business?
Common Scenario
A blog just archives content in reverse chronological order, and doesn't have an effective navigation menu, especially if you're using one of the blog service providers, such as blogger. This poor navigation scheme makes browsing a blog extremely frustrating. Moreover, people can link to one blog content of yours, but the link will soon be outdated. This is because when new content is added, old content will be pushed down to another page; say from page 3 to page 4. So, Internet surfers following the link pointing to page 3 will see a completely irrelevant article (the original linked article is now on page 4). When people see irrelevant content, they will leave your site. You wrote good content that other webmasters wanted to link to, and you got visitors. But, because you used a blog, people left your site.
Usage
Here are rules of thumb for proper ways of using blogs.
- don't use a blog to archive content.
- only use blogs for announcements that will be obsolete when they get old, i.e., announcement of special sales. (When the sale is over, the announcement has no value.)
Here is one thing to note. Many people think blogs and RSS are the same things, but they aren't. You don't need to use a blog in order to use RSS; you can syndicate new content on your normal site (not blog) via RSS, like I do. This way you don't have to deal with the blog-specific problems mentioned above.
Marketing
Additionally, blogs are so famous that the word "blog" gets more attention than other words, such as "RSS". You may say "subscribe to my blog" for your RSS feed, even though you are not using a blog. This usage of the term is technically incorrect. So what? That's what called "marketing".
© June, 2008