there's always time for blogging

“Blog” – even the word gets most business owners backs up. Perhaps they are hearing “spam” or “personal diary” or “unprofessional” or “more work”??? Who knows! Either way it’s worth knowing the benefits of a blog before you decide they are a waste of time.

A blog has value to multiple groups of people and also from a scientific online marketing perspective.

A blog can be as professional or as intimate as you choose, although most companies take the opportunity to inject a little more personality into a blog than they might into any other content on a website.

A blog doesn’t have to be written by the MD exclusively, in fact, it’s probably best if it isn’t

So … let’s get down to “what’s the point”.

Well, firstly a “cared for” blog overcomes one of my personal bug bares that you find on so many websites. “Corporate bull****”, particularly the type that small companies write because they feel that’s the tone that wins big contracts / sales. A blog is 10 times more interesting (insightful) to read on a companies website before deciding whether to engage their services.

You can use a blog to show that you know what you are talking about. This is great on many levels. If you are passionate about your skill or service, shout about it, every detail, regularly. Would you prefer to have your wedding photo’s taken by a “paying the bills” hobbyist or a photography fanatic? It’s hard to tell the difference with corporate website text.

A blog shows that you are real people. You like to do business with real people…? me too.

Blogs are written by people (duh!). Leave your name at the end of each blog post you write. When I have somebody coming to visit me (for interview, meeting or other) the first thing I do is Google them. It’s not impressive to see drunken, sun burnt holiday snaps (usually) in Facebook, but it’s very (very) impressive to see a list of articles that prove this person knows their onions in their industry.

Blogs are loved by search engines. If you use one of the smart free tools to write your blog (like wordpress) your blog will be read by Google and indexed in it’s blog search within 10 minutes of you posting your entry. How good for marketing and website discovery is that?!? (It’s very good).

Blogs also notify other blog owners if you send links or make reference to their blogs. Quite often these other blog owners comment on what you have written, and send a link back to your blog so that their readers know what they are talking about. Let me phrase this sentence in another way…Blogs are a brilliant way to get loads of links from relevant websites!!! (Links are pretty much the currency of the internet).

Still not convinced about the value of blogs?…ok, but at least you took the time to consider some of the benefits.

A domain name is the address on which your website will reside (i.e. www.mydomainname.com) and the address to which you will receive emails (i.e. mrsjones@mydomainname.com).

Assuming you run a business, you would want your domain name to tie in with your company name where possible. It’s logical that a company called “Edge of the Web Ltd” (that’s us by the way!) would have the domain edgeoftheweb.co.uk or edgeoftheweb.com.

choose your name wisely

Some companies like to use domain names related to the product or service they provide (B&Q use diy.com), which can have a beneficial effect on marketing online, but doesn’t make a great deal of sense to customers. People’s attention is precious and asking them to remember multiple names to reference your business is a bit greedy.

Of course, not every domain name that we would like to use is still available. The domain name land rush happened 10 years ago now, and whilst some great opportunities for short and catchy domain names do still exist, they are fewer and further between.

Quite often when starting a new business or project I will perform both a company name and domain name search at the same time, to ensure I can tie in my branding.

.co.uk and .com are usually the best suffixes to target. .co.uk makes it clear that you are a UK business, and .com is better for multi-national audiences.

Keep you domain name as short as possible – a memorable domain name is a big help to your customers. There is nothing more annoying than try to email sue@my-stupid-long-company-domain-name-that-nobody-can-remember.wasteoftime.co.uk

If you are already tied to a brand name and want to get a similar domain name to match, consider trying the following:

Consider alternative domain suffixes, such as .net, .org, .tv, .info, .biz. Whilst they are not as easy to remember or popular as .co.uk or .com, you can still get some pretty good names to compensate.

Consider adding a regional variation to your domain name such as mydomain-bristol.com or mycompanyuk.com.

Consider using hyphens between words or letters, such as my-domain.co.uk or my-domain-uk.com.

There are occasions where you may want to depart from a company name and go for a keyphrase targeted domain name. This is relevant if you are planning a major online marketing / pr campaign. When your website acquires links from other websites (Google’s favourite method for ranking websites) the words that make up a link are taken into account. If you have “southwest-electrician.com” there is a pretty fair chance you’ll eventually rank pretty high on Google (yahoo, msn, etc) when somebody types in “southwest electrician”.

If you are not planning a major online marketing offensive, don’t waste your time unless you already have a keyphrase targeted company name. The pain you will cause your customers (“what was their website again?!?!) usually offsets the benefit of ranking well for one keyphrase (unless it’s a real biggy like “money.com”, but all those domains are long gone.)

So a final summary of key points to remember:
1) keep your domain name relevant to your business name
2) keep it as short as possible
3) searching for a domain name and company name at the same time can save some pain later

Photos courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons license from users malias