Blogging is an important part of Inbound Marketing

Forget the standard web template approach that most businesses employ, if your organisation wants to generate meaningful, engaged visitors then you should incorporate a blog into your website. Its a significant element of our Inbound Marketing philosophy.

Most corporate websites look fairly similar. There’s been a group-think mentality that your site should all be contained in the one screen, with content not falling “below the fold”. You see the same logo position, same navigation and the same bland corporate information.

What you don’t often see is regularly updated information that is both helpful and relevant to your target audience.

That’s where a blog can become extremely valuable to your organisation. Here are 6 reasons why one should be incorporated into your web presence.

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Here at Sticky we are big fans of 37 Signals and their approach to business and marketing. Recently Gavin Heaton posted this video on his site and I was surprised that I hadn’t seen it before. In it, Jason Fried from 37 Signals discusses marketing by sharing, which is a big part of the whole Inbound Marketing approach we encourage. Its such a good video that I thought I’d share it with you too.

Grab a coffee and put your feet up for 20 minutes to watch this.

This week I have been at the Connect Now conference in Sydney. It has had a stellar line-up of speakers including Gavin Heaton @servantofchaos, Katie Chatfield @katiechatfield, Tara Hunt @missrogue, Brian Solis @briansolis, Laurel Papworth @silkcharm, Jim Stewart @jimboot, Darren Rowse @problogger, Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee, Debs Schultz @debs, Stephen Johnson @huxley, Fi Bendall @fibendall, Simon Mainwaring @simonmainwaring, Natalie Hofsteede @givealittle, Simon and Marie Young @audaciousgloop and Chris Noble @worldnomads.

While much of the information and advice might not be new to those already operating in the social media space, it has been extremely beneficial for the vast majority of people who are beginning to use inbound marketing and social media in their businesses instead traditional marketing techniques.

But as someone who attends a lot of new media conferences in Australia and the USA, I was still struck by a few of the key messages at Connect Now.

The biggest take home for me was that authenticity is crucial. While businesses are flooding into social media to take advantage of its burgeoning popularity, very few are succeeding, and that is likely because they lack an authentic voice.

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