A very, very good, pretty detailed article on how blogging can help businesses. The content is interesting but he also quotes and links to a variety of good ressources reinforcing his point. A good starting point for a lot of content on the subject. One of the highlights for me, is the way he brings in RSS; yes there are now millions of blogs but readers’ “blog reading potential” is augmenting also.
And the thing is, anyone can do it. Because blogging is still in its infancy, the effects are only going to increase. Although readership grew 45% last year, the majority of blog readers read less than 10 total blogs. We firmly believe this number is low, because people haven’t discovered efficient ways of processing the information overload. There are thousands of blogs created every second and thanks to RSS technology, the number blogs people are going to be able to keep up with is only going to go up. When RSS becomes a mainstream technology, current readers will only read more blogs and a new crop of voracious readers will emerge. While millions of readers looking for content should be reason enough to focus your energies on them, the importance of courting these influential, eager and financially secure readers should not be undervalued.
Use blogging (content) and good coding (readable content) to draw search engine results, not SEOs.
Google’s goal is not to help those people make money. They actually spend money on fighting SEOs, not helping them. They also spent a lot of money buying the largest growing and used blogging tool out there, which should also give you something else to think about. Google knows that the moment their results aren’t solving people’s solutions or giving people answers, is the moment the people go somewhere else to find things. They have the best programmers and an army of PhDs dedicated to the problem. They’re worth billions. If you’re a small business, (putting aside the fact that these practices are morally and ethically questionable) wasting money on fighting Google might be the worst thing you could possibly do financially.
Required reading for anyone doing business on the web.