All companies should have a blog, to demonstrate their expertise in a particular subject matter and provide a vehicle for two-way communications and engagement with their customers.
This blog that you are reading now is an example of that. I, as the Managing Partner of Red Rocket Ventures, a startup consulting and fund raising firm, am trying to come across as an expert in startups who has lived through the same battles you now find yourself fighting through. Not to mention, for many of you, this is your first time ever hearing about Red Rocket. You may be asking, "why should I trust this firm to help me solve my startup-related problems?". Well, hopefully the quality of the content on this blog not only educates the readers on various topics, but it also instills trust to get prospective clients to actually pick up the phone and engage with me on their various needs.
Also, this blog gives my readers the chance to voice their agreement or disagreement with various points that I am making. For example, when I wrote my post on best practices for marketing, a reader rightly pointed out that offering deep discounts to attract new customers may work better for B2C facing businesses than B2B facing businesses. Hence, further enhancing reader education on the topic, and creating a two-way dialog with my readers, so they too feel like they are participating in the discussion.
There are two other clear marketing advantages of writing a blog. Firstly, search engines love rich content pages, and the more content you write, the more free search traffic you will drive into your website. For example, this blog is only three months old, and is already getting 1,000 visitors per month, largely coming from people searching for information related to the posted topics via Google. That is a lot a traffic for a small consulting firm, which I didn't have to spend one penny on, other than the 30 minutes or so that it takes me to write one post.
The second key marketing advantage is the virility of the content. I have set up this blog to automatically post to my LinkedIn and Twitter status updates. As of today (6/8/11), I have around 650 connections on LinkedIn and around 150 followers on my Twitter account that are receiving headlines to every one of my blog posts (Note: Twitter is up 3x from 50 followers three months ago when I started the blog--so extrapolate 3x per quarter from there). And, since these connections and followers are largely business people related to startups or the digital media industry in which I have worked for the last 12 years, there are very high odds that: (i) the articles are not only interesting reading for them; but (ii) they will most likely forward or retweet the articles to their thousands of collective connections and followers of their own, all ripe new prospects for my own business (hence why Twitter followers are up 3x in three months and over 100 companies have reached out to me).
So, for the reasons above, consider a blog a vital component of your website, search marketing and social marketing strategies. And, don't forget to ask for new followers, as I do in my last sentence below in all posts.
For future posts, please follow me at: www.twitter.com/georgedeeb.