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Welcome to CoOpTek's tech blog. This being my first post, I thought I'd write about blogging...

I never thought I'd become a blogger. What do I have to say that hasn't already been said a thousand times before all over the Internet? Like Fran Lebowitz said, "Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met". But I've come to learn that blogging is important for a business for several reasons. Sometimes it's not so important that you have something original or brilliant to say, but just that you put yourself out there so that your clients get a sense for who you are and what you can contribute.

One big reason that blogging is important is that it can increase Internet traffic to your website. An article I read recently said that "active business blogs draw 6.9 times more organic search traffic than non-bloggers" and that "small businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors". First of all, blogging increases the amount of content on your website, and it makes it more current with trends in your industry, which should increase your search engine rankings. It can also build credibility and help establish you as a "Thought Leader" in your field, which will attract links from other sites, which is another great way to increase your search engine ranking.

Another thing that blogging can help with is pushing content out to the web, rather than waiting for web traffic to come to the site. In the old days you would put up a web site and then do a bunch of marketing to try to pull people in to visit it. Now, there are ways that you can push the content out through RSS feeds and aggregators, automated social media marketing services, and by spreading links through public bookmarking sites, trackbacks, etc. (I’ll talk more about these in future blog posts). For every fresh new blog entry that you create, you can find lots of web conversations where someone else is talking about the same topic in which you can interject your say on the matter with a link back to your blog.

And finally, one more important benefit of blogging is that it provides a human voice to your company. By putting yourself out there, you are personally interacting with a larger audience than you could otherwise, building community and engagement, which translates into brand loyalty. So I’m taking the plunge into the wonderful world of blogging. Come back often to see what we’re up to at CoOpTek!