Southern Fields Web Service

I was listening to Jon Udell on The Gillmore Gang podcast the other day, and Mr Udell, who works for Microsoft, referenced one of his old blog posts about the orders-of-magnitude advantage blogging (and by extension, the use of other social media applications) has over email and other web 1.0 means of communication. Same work, much greater distribution. Here is an excerpt from “Too Busy To Blog? Count Your Keystrokes“:

From this perspective, blogging is a communication pattern that optimizes for the amount of awareness and influence that each keystroke can possibly yield. Some topics, of course, are necessarily private and interpersonal. But a surprising amount of business communication is potentially broader in scope. If your choice is to invest keystrokes in an email to three people, or in a blog entry that could be read by those same three people plus more — maybe many more — why not choose the latter? Why not make each keystroke work as hard as it can?

When I can refer people to a site I have written and continually update as a reference, I am avoiding duplication of effort and putting my best foot forward. Because most questions about your business are essentially the same questions, over and over, you can maximize your reach and authority while minimizing your effort by communicating on your blog.

Read John Udell’s whole article “Too Busy To Blog?”. Read it twice. It is uncommon common sense for busy small business people.

A beauty of blogging as a business tool is that your site is a fluid ever-changing process of the sort that search engines love. You have the ability to go back and update old posts. But should you bother updating old posts, particularly ones which appear to have little traction? Isn’t it better just to write a new post? I would have thought that there was no question that adding a new post was the best use of energy, but this article in Performancing, to whose feed you should be subscribing, BTW, puts a finer point on it. Here is an excerpt:

The solution, in my opinion, would be to write a new post now and update the old post later. Obviously, you want to create the new post to give readers something to read, and people could simply go back to the old article via links if they wished. Afterwards, you update your old post with some of the new information, and then link to your newer post. This gives people that come from search engines and social sites a reason to go to another page on your site, and if that happens, they are much more likely to subscribe.

Read the whole article by James Mowery on the Performancing Blog, and add Performancing RSS feed to your feedreader.