Lessons Learned About Blogging

We’ve been blogging here at Online Marketing Blog for just over three years, learning ins and outs along the way. Here are a few of the lessons learned in that time:

• Blogging has been the single most effective marketing initiative for our search marketing agency second only to providing top service to clients who then refer us to other companies. In fact our top sources of new business are:
  1. Referrals
  2. Blog
  3. Articles
  4. Web site
  5. Conferences
• Blogs can serve as a very effective platform for connecting online social networks and offline interactions.
• One of the most effective ways at getting into the media is to become the media in your industry via a blog.
• Finding your “blog voice” is important. People will visit and interact with your blog based on whether your regular communication patterns resonate with them or not. If you’re all over the board, you’ll hold some people for a while, but not long.
• A rushed blog post that is not well thought out can quickly cause the wrong kind of attention or misinterpretation.
• As your blog grows in popularity (RSS subscribers and visitors via links and search engines) the more you have to lose or gain with the quality of your posts.
• The whole transparency thing is great in theory, but is only as effective as your ability and willingness to articulate.
• Don’t do it all on your own. Invite guest bloggers and include other bloggers from your company.
• Don’t blog when you’re mad, really tired and especially not if you’ve been out on the town.
• Blogs can be excellent conduits to connections and friendships with people that you may never meet in person.
• Blogging is forever. Once you hit publish, it’s out there. There’s no taking it back.
• The feedback loop to blogging can get addicting and like other addictions, can have serious side effects. Consuming a large part of your productive and free time without a corresponding return on effort is one of those side effects. These effects can be abated by having a clear blogging strategy and following blogging guidelines.
• Blogs can be exceptional tools to boost visibility on search engines as well as social media channels.
• Poorly configured, badly optimized and infrequently updated blogs are nothing more than spam magnets.
• It’s just as important, and maybe more, to link out from your blog as it is to get incoming links.
• Widgets and plugins can be very effective if not necessary enhancements to default blog configurations that will assist in building community, making administration easier and for blog optimization.
• Online Marketing Blog has been a very effective tool for building credibility and opening doors to connections with search engines and people in the search marketing industry that would otherwise might not have happened.

If you’ve been blogging for a while, what lessons have you learned?