BloggingLine - Blogging Tips & Resources

My last article talked about some reasons why company should start blogging. This time, I want to share my opinion about another topic — it’s still related to my previous one. This time, I will write something a little bit technical, and — of course — it’s related to blogging activities.

If someone (or even a company) wants to start blogging (after having the concept), the very first questions to answer is: “What’s the best platform?”. The simple answer should be: “Use a blog engine as its platform. Period.” But, sometime, some companies go to an opposite direction. They created their own platform, getting someone make a custom content management, etc. For what reason? Because “it’s just cool to have our own application”? Think again! Personally, if it’s related to — again! — blog, it’s useless to build blogging application from zero, especially today. Why?

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Blog is about opinion. Blog is also about information. And, if we’re talking about blog, we talk about information flow and publishing mechanism. We’re also talking about communication, marketing and business.

I will not talking about how blog can change people’s life. But, I want to propose some reasons for companies which haven’t started blogging. Okey, here are some reasons why you (company) should start blogging:

• You need to publish yourself, right? As a company, you want people know about you — on the Internet. People want to know about what happens to your company. If you have a good news, you want to publish it to the universe. Blog can do this. If we want to publish to other media like newspaper, news portal… they probably do not want to hear your news. Using your own publishing system, you can tell stories your way.
• It’s CHEAP. You do not have to spend millions of dollar only for having online publishing tool. Of course, every company has its own decision on how to spend money, but most of them probably have the same consideration: spend less, get more. We can have a blog set in few minutes.
• It’s easy. Some companies probably wonder: how can a non-geek can publish such stories? How can they have their contents well-organized?
• It has THE technologies. What technologies offered by blog as a publishing system?
  • Search engine optimization. Try to search about your company or products. You will find many blogs in the search results. Do you pay them to publish news about you. Probably. But, what if they published unexpected news?
  • Content management system. You can organize your content in an easy way by categories, date of post, keywords, etc.
  • Social networking. Blog is designed to be a tool for communication. It’s about “delivering contents”.

Those are some reasons to start a blog. If there are companies which think that blog is useless, I am so curious about their reasons.

Thomas Arie Setiawan is currently living in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and run a blog called Orangescale.NET. Together with some friends, he runs a small web design service called Orangescale Studio.