Q & A: Aren’t corporate blogs too self-serving and salesy?

Q. Mike Goldstein of Rockcoastmedia asked me recently:

“I have been
debating whether or not to suggest [that] my SEO clients add a blog to their
corporate site. I am afraid that corporate blogs come off as too self serving
and tend to talk too much about the company. Have you seen much in corporate blogs
getting the attention that personal blogs get on similar topics?”

A. And my response:

Interesting question. I suspect that Dell’s new Direct2Dell blog is getting way more traffic than most personal blogs. Just checked on Technorati, and Dell’s blog is ranked 17,976 out of 50 million blogs after being up for about two months.

And certainly GM’s Fastlane blog (ranked 2,496 on Technorati after 20 months) gets lots of traffic (several hundred thousand page views a month last I checked).

For smaller companies, it helps to think of a blog as the interactive, fresh section of the Web site. In other words, a blog is simply an adjunct to your main site.

If the content of the blog is interesting and non-salesy (and includes appropriate keyword phrases) it should appear high in search engine results (on those keywords) and prompt clickthroughs to your home page or whatever pages you choose to highlight on your blog layout.

As a point of comparison, this blog ranks (as of today) 5,570 on Technorati. I like to say it’s a Top 5,000 Blog which ain’t too bad, considering there are (as of today) 52.6 million blogs, according to Technorati.

I’ve been writing this blog for almost two years. So longevity counts. Ya gotta stick with it and keep writing. And yes of course I wish it were a Top 1,000 blog or in the Top 100. Probably not gonna happen because I do other stuff besides blog.

Have you got a question about corporate blogging?

Ask me in a live teleconference I’m hosting on Friday Sept. 15th Wednesday Sept. 20th from 12 noon to 2 PM Eastern. Ticket to entry? The session is free if you buy 5 copies of my book from 800-CEO-Read. Email your receipt to me at wordbiz(at)gmail.com and I’ll send you the dial-in info. Details here.

Hope you’ll join us!