Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - Posts

Marketers and Blogging

There's a good article on WebPronews today highlighting the top six reasons for marketers to engage in blogging, including the following:

  1. Fast search engine spidering and indexing of your site
  2. Blogs can build backlinks quickly
  3. A frequently updated blog will keep the spiders visiting your site
  4. Your site is sticker and more appealing to visitors
  5. A blog is the fastest and easiest way to build a brand-new Website without training
  6. Keywod competition in RSS feed sites is much less than in the SE's

Blogging seems to be a great medium for creating synergy between marketers and PR professionals as companies launch blogs as joint ventures.  Both professions can obviously see great value in real discussion with prospective customers and partners.  It will be interesting to see how this synergy evolves in 2005.

An Edge for Women-Owned Businesses

We've already seen statistics showing the fact that women make up the majority of bloggers, this article from Press Trust outlines 10 strategies that can give an edge to women-owned businesses in 2005. The list comes from Dr. Letitia Wright of the Wright Place TV Show. Numbers 1, 2 and 7 from her list stood out to me:

1. Blog - blogs are easy to use and maintain and give you the freedom of updating as little or as much as you want. You can have blogs where you write, create audio or even video if you want.

2. Power PR - More women business owners are understanding the power of Public Relations and making sure News Releases about them or their businesses go out about 5-9 times a year.

7. RSS - This is new but you can use RSS to get the information without surfing for it, it comes to your desktop, and your customers can get your information every time you update it. Those who know how to use RSS will jump ahead of everyone else. You need a RSS reader, the one at www.pluck.com is very useful in a lot of different ways.

WebProNews to Republish Another PR Blogger

Neville Hobson's NevOn has now joined the ranks of Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion, Andy Beal's SearchEngineLowdown, and Jerermy Zawodny's blog.  Similar to the others, it is an informal arrangement, where WebProNews will choose to re-publish at their discretion.   

Congrats to this gang of bloggers, particularly to Steve and Neville for how this advances the cause of PR.  Imagine this...one day these guys just decided to start  blogs, whose visibility may have not reached past their cubicles, and now they're being viewed by the masses. 

Hmmm...there's certainly something to this.  And mark my words, this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Watch the relationships like this unfold in 2005.