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Just a clever title to get you to read these two blog posts from Content Marketing Today:

Content Marketing Today

Why Your Website is Just the Beginning of an Online Strategy Posted: 01 May 2009 05:18 AM PDT Of course you need a website. But, you need a lot more to succeed. Your website is a primary location for product and service information for which your customers are searching. Moreover, it should follow the content marketing mandate of customer centricity. That is, your website must reflect an understanding of what’s most important to your customers in the way that you present content about who you are, what you sell, and why your visitors should care. But, that’s still just the essential foundation. An effective website is necessary but not sufficient as an online marketing strategy. Patsi Krakoff makes this very clear in her insightful post, Why Your Website Is Not Enough (…and never will be, sorry) Patsi sets a pretty high bar for your social media involvement, especially if you are a small independent professional services provider. But, if you’re skeptical about the need to go behind a basic website, pay attention to the research she cites from eMarketer. They estimate current monthly blog readers at almost 100 million in 2009 with an expected growth of almost 30% by 2013. As David Tokheim of Six Apart Media (the blogging software company) noted in the eMarketer article: “The lines are becoming blurred between a standalone blog that might be created on TypePad or Blogger or WordPress and blog content that’s created by The New York Times.” Clearly, the idea of a business blog is no longer a fringe concept. Patsi argues that far from being a fringe marketing method, it should be a vital component of what every business or professional does online. As she puts it: You probably can get away with just a few web pages for a while. But for how long? If you wait, you’re not creating and building up the body of online content you need in order for you to get "Google juice," and clients won’t find you when they do a search. Your web pages won’t get good page rankings. Your site won’t get found. They will find your competitors instead. Even if you think that starting a blog may stretch your resources painfully, be sure to read all of what Patsi has to say about why the possible pain will justify the marketing payoff. For those of you who are already agonizing over multiple social media possibilities and want to know where to focus, check out our article: 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool

6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool Posted: 01 May 2009 04:34 AM PDT It’s much more powerful than those young whippersnappers–Twitter and Facebook We often talk about the need to develop a content marketing mindset. This requires companies to think like publishers. And that sounds an awful lot like social media as Wikipedia defines it: Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Your blog is your secret social media weapon Thanks to free or inexpensive blogging tools, any individual can be on the same technological footing as the New York Times or Business Week. That may seem relatively obvious to many of you. What I think is less obvious is that your blog is every bit as much a social media tool as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. In fact, I believe that a blog is the most important social media weapon in your arsenal. Here are the 6 reasons that your blog must be the core of your social media strategy: To have meaningful social media impact, you must provide a critical mass of content that will position you and your organization as thought leaders within your market niche. Nothing works better than a blog to achieve that objective. Over time, your blog will contain an increasingly rich and relevant reservoir of information that serves as a Google magnet. Thus, you will become more and more findable by those customers you need to attract. You can provide an unlimited amount of vital information in a single location. Because Web visitors are desperately seeking answers to their most pressing questions, you have the opportunity to provide just the right answers for your ideal target customers. The best blogs can provide the vast majority of targeted information that there ideal visitors require in their search for solutions. Content aside, the structure of a blog enables you to organize your information almost effortlessly to the benefit of your visitors. By defining the most important areas of information that you will cover and translating them into ‘categories,’ you enable your visitors to find exactly what they want with minimal effort. Unlike other social media tools, such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, your blog is open to the entire world. This enables you to achieve potentially infinite reach for your critical mass of content. Although you may request visitors to register and offer them enticements such as a free e-book or eNewsletter, they don’t have to join a special club to benefit from your information. You can be both timely and comprehensive. Although Twitter couldn’t be more timely, the information, opinions, and advice you tweet can never be comprehensive. Your blog can be just as timely as Twitter because you can post information instantaneously. But you can also make each post as comprehensive as necessary and integrate that post with lots of other relevant information on your blog. Your blog posts, far from being isolated from other great tools such as Facebook and Twitter, can be automatically pulled into each one. Thus, those two powerhouses can enhance your online presence every time you post an article on your blog. That’s three for the price of one. Not bad. The bottom line: Start your blog today. It’s that important. Then start thinking about Facebook and Twitter–and all the other possible social media tools you might consider.

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