Corporate Blogs are for PageRank not ChitChat

So you have got yourself a brand new shiny social media consultant. They jump right in talking about corporate blogging as meaningful connection with “the community”. Here’s what you now do: Fire that consultant.

Your corporate blog is wood warpingly, paint dryingly banal and boring to most people, probably including yourself. If not you are wasting your time, because as interesting and concise and readable as you make it, it still won’t be read.

A corporate blog has one main job: distribution. This is not corporate marketing brand distribution through dedicated followers of your worthy blog. No one else finds it interesting – I’ll let you into a secret it is really boring. Take a look at the Google blog now …I bet your back in ten seconds. Its all about ‘Me” as in Google talk about themselves, their products and their greatness. They try to be relaxed and chatty. They come across a anal and a bit boring.  

So if a blog = distribution but not branding? How does that work? PageRank. Use your blog for link-building and SEO.

Take a look at Mint.com’s blog. Mint is a finance tool – software for bookkeeping. Mint publishes massive articles about personal finance to their blog, and have legion readers. Not a bad trick, but the main thing is that their content is useful. It’s a mag about personal finance without the advertisements. Social media channels cannot help but find picks Mint’s content, there is lots of it, mush of it useful and it gets refreshed frequently so it receives lots of inbound links.

Mint milk these inbound links. That’s the trick. At the bottom of every blog post is a list of key words which link to internal pages containing high level snippets about the topic

Mint is maximising their PageRank with the popularity of the blog. If you’re a personal finance website, you will want to optimise around some of these keywords. And it’s really working for them.

Take a look at Google’s Keyword Tool and look at the traffic for these keywords. Then put them into a Google Search and see where Mint appear in the return. Then multiply keyword traffic by the distribution of clicks for the top results in Google, you’ll see that Mint is getting at least 100,000 uniques per month from Google for these keywords.

If you hire a copywriter to post on your own corporate blog, you could achieve the same result. You need a writer whose words are worth reading. A decent freelancer churning a blog post of 1,000 words, at least once per week. 5 posts like this per month will cost £1000 – £2000.

You could buy the traffic from Google by bidding on these keywords. A generous estimate of a bid price for keywords like this is 10p  (if you are lucky). To buy 100,000 uniques would therefore cost you £10,000 per month, and you will not get the PageRank.

Of course, the success of this strategy isn’t as quantifiable as buying ads, but it will get you traffic. Any decent writer will be able to garner attention via social media sites like Digg and Reddit, generating backlinks. All you need to do is find out what keywords to optimise for, and put them in the blog template.

This Article is based on a brilliant article by Ted Dziuba on January 19, 2009

Corporate Blogs: It’s The PageRank, Stupid