No one, to my knowledge, has written a manifesto about blogging for higher education, so until they do, Debbie Weil’s Beginner’s Guide to Business Blogging will have to do. Here’s an excerpt:
Why Blog? Isn’t My e-Newsletter Enough?
Unless your e-newsletter or ezine has your customer’s mortgage statement attached to it, you’ll be lucky if your subscribers open it. Between the new federal CAN-Spam legislation, spam filters and actual spam, inbox noise has reached an all-time high. Don’t get me wrong — email is still a viable marketing tool. In fact, email is now in its mature phase as a killer app of online marketing.
But a blog may be the perfect complement to an e-newsletter. Here’s why:
» Since blogs aren’t email, inbox clutter and spam filters are a non-issue. But readers can still subscribe to blogs using an RSS newsreader.
» Blogs, through an easy interface, publish instantly. No formatting, no templates, no fancy coding.
» Search engines love blogs. Each entry on your blog is its own Web page (even if it’s a one-liner). And search engines are drawn to fresh, updated pages. So by virtue of blogging, you can drive traffic to your company or business site — without hiring an expensive SEO (search engine optimization) service.
There’s a lot more good advice for beginning bloggers — and handy reminders for those of us who’ve been doing this for awhile. Link via ChangeThis.
Andy writes! 