In 2005, 548 years after Guttenberg invented the printing press, a 19-year-old University of Houston student Matt Mullenweg, launched WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging platform.
By Ross Furlong, MD of BlogStar
While Guttenberg’s invention is clearly the more significant historical moment, allowing books to be mass produced for the first time, the impact high grade free blogging software has had on publishing is not to be sniffed at.
In 2005, it enabled, for example, another 19 year old, Pete Cashmore to start a news blog on social media from his house in Aberdeen. Today Mashable is the world’s largest news site on social and digital media, with more than 50 million monthly page views, 739K Facebook likes and 2.7m Twitter followers.
The same year, Adriana Huffington launched her eponymous blog, which had accumulated 13 million unique users per month by the time of its acquisition for a reported $315m by AOL in February 2011 and Is still the top ranked blog in the world according to Technorati.
While Mashable and The Huffington Post have scaled rapidly into large media organisations with many posts per day, lone bloggers like Seth Godin have proved that you can also build a vast audience with just one post a day, if the content is good enough.
The value of this comparatively low volume, high quality blogging is well established in the US, where new wave marketing companies like HubSpot espouse the benefits of ‘inbound marketing’ – where great blog content is key to maximising the potential of SEO, social media and customer engagement.
In the UK, its the fleeter footed organisations who have woken up to the idea that blogging can be an important part of a company’s growth strategy. The Sunday Times recently profiled the online deliveries service Shutl whose owner Tom Allason blogs about how the online retail market is evolving. “We don’t have a long track record but a blog helps us develop one” Allason says. “We know which investors read it, because they ask smarter questions.”
Allason spends around 6 hours on each blog, a serious time commitment for any entrepreneur and a practical impossibility for a busy, salaried employee. This is at the heart of why many more organisations don’t blog as much as they should. The answer is to make some budget available for this type of activity.
As with social media, it’s the companies that are prepared to invest early, who will gain the best returns on their blogs in competitive markets. The demand for free, quality content has never been higher and with established media disappearing behind pay walls, big spaces are opening up for blogs in all sectors.
Have a look around at the content your customer’s consume and consider this – for the price of one advert in monthly magazine, how many blog posts could you commission?
Content is king though and a content strategy should be the starting point for any blog, including a professional editorial features list.
Your first blog post is the start of a long journey, but a very rewarding one, as many of the pioneers have found out.
BlogStar.co.uk
