Why You should be Blogging

Blogging gives you the best return on investment when promoting your company, your message, your ideas online. Bar None. Anyone not running a Blog on their site is fundamentally at a disadvantage compared to someone who is. 

The visual above gives some indication into the time it takes to do each of the four primary text-based online content types. Press Releases typically take days to organise, especially if there are 3rd parties involved. News stories typically take half a day to organise since the content has to be extremely precise and fairly formal. Sourcing good media can also take considerable time. Status Updates / Tweets / Micro-blogs are much faster to create but they typically link to external blogs or articles, and do not generate any inbound links of their own.

Blog Posts on the other hand are easy to create and sit at the heart of the world wide web. The beauty of blog posts is that they can be informal, have personality, be rich in opinion or simple statements of facts. They are easy to create so you can create them much more frequently than traditional corporate communications. They are also something that people can follow.

The Blog itself is simply the start. The way the web works today facilitates the distribution of your Blog posts. Affino offers a number of great tools to leverage the posts so that they become the heart of your corporate message:

Search Engines / SEO

Search Engines love frequently updated pages. You can leverage your Blog content throughout your site to provide fresh on-topic content through using highlights design elements.

RSS Feeds / Syndication

All your Blog content can be syndicated. You should use the outbound feeds to seed key sites throughout the web. Users can also follow your latest updates using Google Reader and similar tools.

Newsletters / Content Subscriptions

All Blog content can be dynamically included in automated weekly newsletters or sent out in real-time content subscriptions.

Social Media

Blogs can be instantly promoted on the leading Social Media portals such as Facebook and Twitter. The Social Campaigns in Affino allow you to do this real-time.

Topic Channels

You can create aggregation pages which pull in all the on-topic news for specific topics. Blog content should be at the heart of this since few things come close in terms of the return on time invested.

Wrap-up

Affino allows you to easily create and leverage your Blog, and if your aim is to reach a wider or more targeted audience and to get your message out more effectively then this is the place to start