Last night was my first Blogging Meetup at the Innevation Center in Las Vegas, which offers state-of-the-art meeting rooms with smoking-fast free wifi, and more, to the southern Nevada tech community. It’s sponsored by Switch, who have ginormous data centers in Vegas, Reno, and worldwide. What a resource. Wow.
Scott Roeben spoke at the Blogging meetup. He runs and writes for the popular VitalVegas blog (irreverent, fun) and is Interactive Marketing Manager for the Fremont Street Experience. Before this he ran a company blog for Caesar’s which was directly responsible for $2 million in revenue. He clearly knows Vegas and knows blogging. Please, please, please, he implores, give your blog personality. This especially applies to corporate blogs. Do not regurgitate press releases and expect anyone to read or care about it. You want engagement. That means people will sometimes say you suck. This will horrify company lawyers and higher management. Oh well. Talk about things not directly related to your company. Once, while at Caesar’s, he blogged about the 10 Best Steak Houses on the Strip, mentioned one not owned by Caesar’s, and “heads exploded” in higher management. Upper management (“make no waves”), lawyers (“our job is to say ‘no'”), and traditional PR people (“blogs are icky”) are the enemies of blogging, especially blogging with a personality.
[bctt tweet=”Use blogs as your hub, social media as spokes. Innevation Center blogging meetup advice” username=”polizeros”]
Use the blog as the hub and social media as the spokes. Experiment to see which social media works best. He says Fremont Street does great on Facebook and is crickets on Twitter, while VitalVegas is the opposite. He has no explanation. Do whatever brings the most engagement and interest.
My own experience echoes this. It’s important to aim a blog towards the potential customer / client. Focus is important. My business blog is aimed solely at upper level IT and management looking for something very specific, which is converting ancient DOS databases to modern Windows platforms.
Thus, I don’t care if someone finds the site and has no idea what it is about. They aren’t the target. The site has been there for ten years, is highly ranked on Google, and the page names never change (that’s important for SEO.) I get almost all my database business from it.
In contrast, almost all my WordPress clients are word-of-mouth. The competition for WordPress dev sites is huge so having a website that gets highly ranked for that is way more difficult than for a niche business like converting DOS databases.
So, figure out what the focus of your site is, and aim the content and marketing towards that.