blogging for quality while attracting paying customers

Who is supposed to read your blog and web content or why Jakob Nielsen and Bryan Eisenberg may both be right

This posting focuses on how an SME can leverage the blogosphere to improve sales and profitability while serving its clients better.

Unless your target audience feels your content adds value – your dollar will be wasted.Jakob Nielsen and Bryan Eisenberg are both correct when claiming key to success is posting quality articles and not shallow content but…

Previously we addressed the blogosphere or mediasphere challenge:

7 reasons why building and hosting your corporate WordPress blog is the best choice 7 steps to success – organic web traffic that matters

expertise-driven blog versus content-driven marketing site – that is the question

Should you use a corporate blog ?

Some people have very strong opinions about this such Jakob Nielsen who says:

Blog postings will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s work. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they’re definitely easy to write. But they don’t build sustainable value.

Jakob Nielsen – Write Articles, Not Blog Postings

Do geographical location and language matter

We have pointed out in our previous post that in Europe at least, people are less likely to check corporate e-mail on weekends than during Tue through Thur. For other regions this might differ.

When will the blog be successful?

Apparently it’s really easy to get zillions of subscribers to any corporate blog. Just follow a few steps, work hard and write good content. I know this, because I read it every week on various pro-blogging sites which are keen to dispense the wisdom of their own success whilst making you feel inferior for having less than 20,000 RSS subscribers.

Get two good viewpoints about this challenge here:

Bryan Eisenberg

Jakob Nielsen

Bottom Line or WHAT IT MEANS FOR US BLOGGERS OUT THERE

What it comes down to is to is to provide

– in-depth versus superficial content

– original and primary postings versus derivative or reflective musings about other people’s research, AND

– driven by your staff’s expertise versus being driven by other news sites or outside events.

A philosophy we have been following with our benchmarking and ranking blog over here:

ComMetrics – measure the rest against the rest

And no:

Google, Digg.com and Twitter: Why such Drive-By Traffic is of Little Value