Why blog?

Four reasons why we blog

I’m often asked from inside and outside of our team; ‘why do we put so much time, effort and resource into regularly producing blog posts?’

It is an understandable question. It’s not easy to find time in a busy diary to write an article and it can be tricky to come up with an engaging subject. It’s also costly to pay people to write, edit and publish articles.

So why do it? Why do we regularly write and publish new content? Here are four reasons:

1. It encourages the team to think deeper about a problem to the point they can articulate the solution

It has not always been the case, but increasingly the most important reason we continue to create and contribute to the blog (we’ve now got almost 60 articles) is an internal one.

It’s easy for a staff member within any company to just go about their work, trying to improve what they do but essentially just doing what they are being paid for and little more. At Brightec we aim to foster an environment of continuous improvement. This is not just within the products we produce, but within every aspect of what we do.

This affects the more obvious elements of software development and product management, but also the small and seemingly insignificant issues such as; office layout, staff contracts and internal relationships.

We want the company to operate in the most efficient and effective way as possible, with our staff feeling engaged, supported and ultimately enjoying their work. We want to build a great company!

Writing blog posts is an effective way of helping ourselves to think deeper about what we do. Why do we go about tasks in a certain fashion? Is there a better way? Can we improve on something that already exists? It forces us to research and articulate what we’ve been thinking about and working on.

“Writing blog posts is an effective way of helping ourselves to think deeper about what we do”

2. We’re able to put something back into the digital community that we’re a part of

We’re privileged to operate in an industry where there is a precedent for open source software and open conversation and support.

We regularly take advantage of other blogs, services and forums to help us learn, improve and often solve problems within the projects we’re working on.

It’s important therefore we take seriously our own responsibility to contribute back into this community. Our own blog contributes to 66% of our search traffic so we must be doing something right. The next step is for us to add commenting ability to our blog so that we can interact further with the community we’re serving (watch this space).

3. Other visitors to our site see that we know what we talking about

Clearly a website for a company such as ours mostly exists to attract new clients and projects. It is important for those people in particular to quickly see that we know what we’re talking about and can be trusted with their valuable product or service.

Our blog is one simple way to demonstrate this, as well as educate new clients on our services, methodologies and company tone/style.

Some recent research proves this point aptly with B2B businesses with company blogs generating 67% more leads than companies without blogs.

“B2B businesses with company blogs generate 67% more leads than companies without blogs”

4. Backlinks for SEO

We’re not SEO experts (we’re yet to fully master the dark arts), but we do know that one of the metrics Google and other search engines use to rank a site is Domain Authority. In part this is influenced by who else is linking to you and their own Domain Authority.

So it follows if we can create content that is interesting — then interesting people will link to us and in turn help our own rankings.

So there we are: four reasons we will continue to write blog posts as often as possible despite the internal costs involved.

Our blog & social media presence are managed by Matt Simmonds http://matt.amsterdam

Originally published at www.brightec.co.uk.