US News and World Report Blogging for Business article right on target

September 29, 2008 by Doug Mitchell

Image via Wikipedia

Matthew Bandyk wrote a great piece in US News and World Report called How to Blog Your Way to Small Business Success .

The article includes quotes from some key blogging, social media, and marketing guys in practice today including:

John Jantsch of Ducttape Marketing
Chris Brogen of just about everything social media
Joel Libava of “The Franchise King”. (Thanks to Rush Nigut for introducing me to Joel’s blog a while ago)

I think the main punch of the piece is that it summarizes the 5 key reasons why small businesses should blog. I’d like to highlight number 5

5) Keep it simple with search engine optimization. That’s the term for getting the most out of Google searches for your site. There are countless ways to figure out how to make your blog more search-engine friendly. But trying to know everything about it is almost a second job.

Yes! Most of us are really too busy to understand the inner workings of why search engines love us or hate us. We coach that you should ONLY consider building your corporate website platform on a blogging software platform like WordPress or Typepad. The bottom line is that with templates and other “plugins” and “widgets” there’s nothing you can’t do to give your blog the FULL treatment from the corporate brochure ware stuff…to the keyword/link/meta data rich blog stuff. Just give yourself the best chance to be more findable. Or…as we say,

“Raise your Internet Findability Factor.”

As a small business here in the Des Moines metro area, in Corona, California, or New Philadelphia, Ohio…you need to focus on high return activities. Although small business blogging may be a long term investment, it will pay dividends far greater than the norm over time.