Thursday, March 01, 2007

Some thoughts on blogging


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It's been busy after the Christmas holidays. And, in typical Jack Garcia fashion, I forgot, or just couldn't get in the mood to focus on updating my blog.

Which brings me to some important characteristics of blogs. Timeliness comes to mind. Frequency is another. Quite importantly is commitment.

Part of the service I offer my clients is help in setting up blogs and their regular updating. The work involved is not merely setting up and publishing, but a strong emphasis on pinging.

After all, what's the point of putting out a blog that's helping promote your company, if you don't take advantage of the search engines' current attraction with blogs. (It's current flavour of the month.)

Search engines love content. That's what they live on. Content.

They look for content, relate these to keywords and help users search and browse the web looking for information.

Search engines' web robots crawl the internet looking for new content.

So, what bloggers should do after a new post is to make sure that search engines know that there's something new. Ping the search engines.

A ping is a quick note to the search engines to let them know that you have new content (a new post) in your blog.

Anyway, I digress.

For bloggers who use this communication means to help promote their business, commitment is important. Before I start blogs for clients, I ask them to commit to keeping the blog alive as a matter of course.

It's like starting a communication piece, eg, a newsletter and stopping after only a few issues.

Blogs are a lot simpler a proposition, also cheaper and arguably with greater reach and more timelines, so this medium should be easier to keep up.

Which brings me back to why I have not updated my blog. Mea culpa. Plain human frailty. Unable to focus. Laziness. Just couldnt' be bothered. You name it.

Enough, rambling. With this blog, I promise to be more timely, more frequent and hopefully very relevant.

Until my next posting.