The Interaction Between Your Blog and Website

- May 21st, 2009 by Steven Leung

puzzle fit“I’m intrigued but my company already has a website,” he said.  Most do.  This one was a well-made site with clean copy and crisp graphics that downloaded quickly and we browsed most of its 10 pages while we were sitting at the coffee house.

We got to the page about their consulting services and I stopped for a moment to bring up a new browser window.  I asked him to describe what they did, while I opened up one of his competitors’ sites.  He read about what the competition said on their website and sighed, “Well, that’s exactly what we do too — I know we’re better but I’m not sure how we’d differentiate ourselves.”

In a way, that was true.  You could run down the checklist of all the services his company provided and it would look the same as his competition’s.  Which is one reason why their websites said basically the same things and had similar slogans.  If it weren’t for the images, you couldn’t tell them apart.

“Tell me about one of your happy customers.”  He talked about how he’d managed to save a company he was working with 20% on their labor costs because he installed an automated system to take care of something very manually intensive.  We talked some more and he had literally dozens of these types of stories that showed how his service was different than anyone else’s.

He then interjected himself and said “Well, I can’t put that on our website, we’d have to change everything every time we put one of those case studies up.”  I smiled a bit and fired up a demo of how to add content to a blog and how the navigation would adapt to fit whatever content his team added.

Then I showed him how his website can be your blog or it can be a part of your blog.  In fact, the main website can be built using the same software as your blog.  That way, he wouldn’t necessarily need a daily webmaster: the entire site is manageable by point-click-and-type.

“It’ll also make your web presence easier to find,” I said, showing him how search engines aggressively index content from blogs.  It wasn’t just search engines.  “You can also cross-promote your content automatically, on services like Twitter and LinkedIn.”

I often say that when websites are created, they’re born alone — where that proverbial tree that falls in the forest where no one hears it.  A blog is born connected to potential readers through ping services that notify dozens of websites around the world that you have new content, and through social media where your content can be integrated.

“My blog posts automatically show up on social networks like LinkedIn, where people get to know my credentials.  Then they visit my blog to get to know my company’s style and capabilities.”  He wasn’t a Twitter user so we didn’t go into this, but I’ll often cross-promote some of my articles there and get traffic and subscribers from folks doing Twitter searches.

“I’m not really into this social media stuff,” he said and then he paused.  He looked at the computer, took a sip of coffee and looked back up, “But I can use what we write for the blog in my newsletters, so we don’t have to do that work twice, right?”  I nodded and sensed he was thinking about the next step.

“And if I can email people the newsletter instead of mailing it them, I don’t need as much labor or stamps?”  Then I showed him how he could draw people back to his website and blog to provide more upsell opportunities for his sales force.

Tags: , ,

You might also enjoy reading:

(c) Integrated Marketing Experts | Reach and Convert Prospects Online.

Leave a Reply