Recently I attended Connect 09, in San Francisco which is produced by Inman News. If you’re not familiar with this conference you’re missing some of the most relevant news, technology, trends, and networking opportunities the business offers.
What was interesting was the underlying current of people that said they were bloggers, yet didn’t understand how blogging worked exactly. I’m speaking in terms of more business and not a vanity parade or a new age personal promotion campaign. Blogging is not about that. This is to say it’s about consumers and not about the content provider.
It is really about dating. Time stamping, in other words. The moment you click the button that causes your content to be published to the Internet. Let’s say you’re looking online for information about a cancer for instance. Just two years ago you would have seen websites and a few places offering information on bulletin boards that dated back to 1958 for example. Much of that information you would have to sift through to find what you’re looking for. So, you make the information “relevant” to you by searching for more recent information related to your query about cancer. Assuming you don’t want cancer information that was originally published in the 1920’s.
Consumers rarely go to real estate sites looking for houses for sale in 1972. They want houses for sales today. Some that even came on the market today. So, your content you provide consumers needs to reflect the time. That means you can’t write to your blog last month and expect traction in cyberspace. Search engines want to help people by making the returns more relevant. And what is relevancy? The date!
So, blog often (everyday) because it really doesn’t take long – just write what you know and the people will come. The search engines see that you’re providing content and its dated everyday, which really means it could be more relevant that the blog someone else wrote last month. This activity will drive your blogs to the top of the list.
And, that is what it has to do with you.
Scott LeForce
President
scott.leforce@rwnc.net
