Running a company blog or blogging for fun and profit

 – posted April 12th, 2007 by Laurence Veale     One comment

Does our blog deliver any value?

To borrow a phrase from Donagh Kiernan, who I met at Share IT in Cork last month, you’re either delivering value or cost for a business, so which one is it for our blog?

The value of business or company blogging

Following on from Richard’s post, there has to be a primary reason for business blogging. It has to deliver value of some kind. Whether you can measure that value is another thing.

De Sales Funnel

To put in purely business terms, our company blog forms part of our overall sales and marketing strategy, but it’s at the broad end of the sales funnel.

Our sales funnel showing blogging at the top leading down

What business value do we actually get from our blog?

We’ve often asked ourselves if our blog readers and our customers are one in the same. Most of the time they’re probably not, but they could be in the future and that’s something we need to be aware of (hence we don’t cuss).

Put simply, it’s called networking. At risk of death by a thousand clichés, networking is not about wearing a sharp suit and passing around slick business cards. It’s about building relationships and we’ve certainly started to do that in a meaningful way with some of our readers. On a personal note, I’ve met a lot of great people over the last couple of months, whether it’s at conferences, un-conferences, Share IT or awards ceremonies.

In fact, some of the people we work with, we originally met on our blog.

Increased exposure

The only thing worse in the world than being talked about is not being talked about.

We’re trying to increase our exposure through blogging. While blogging takes a lot of time, I think is of incredibly more value than some traditional marketing techniques. While not an expert in word of mouth marketing, I know you can’t buy it. It’s a long term strategy.

My hope is that when people think usability, accessibility or web strategy, they’ll think iQ Content.

SEO

Leading on from exposure, blogging is an excellent SEO tool (provided you’re writing well for the web).

That’s pretty much it for the business side of blogging, what else is there?

Being part of the conversation

Here at Usability Central, we talk. A lot. We talk design, usability, accessibility, analytics, enterprise search. Most of it’s really interesting stuff and we want to share that.

There’s some great conversations going on out there, some of which we want to contribute to, others we’ll want to start ourselves. It’s just pure interest.

Sharing knowledge

Sometimes we discover a new way of doing something, or how to take something and make it much better and we want to share it. Colm’s Tracking document downloads in Google Analytics comes to mind.

Back to networking, if you give a little bit of useful information away, you may be seen as an authority on a subject.

Blogging for fun and profit

Photo of Colman and Sean Moncrieff

One of the more bizarre and funny moments of our blog this year was Colman talking to Sean Moncrieff on Newstalk about his post on plastic basin and kitchen sink usability.

Last words..

Before I pass on the blogging baton, the best quote about blogging, I heard this year was from Kieran Murphy of Ice Cream Ireland. When I asked him about blogging, he said his focus was

making really good ice cream and keeping his customers happy.

For me, this means, do what you do best, and if you blog about it, that’s a bonus

And the blogging baton is passed over to..

Categories Blogs and Blogging

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