Is a blog still important in 2011? @jowyang answers Your question
Your website and your blog is the central communications hub for your message, ideas and communication. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are only more means to get traffic to your site and expose more people to your company, your mission, your voice and engage with them, after you wrote something. You have to deliver relevance content and "Feed the Beast" - a play on words, as all the connections with the Interwebs are handled via feeds and apis... Share you knowledge and you will be ahead of the curve and much more visible to the world, then 90% of your competition.
And Blog engines, self-hosted or shared hosted have the best features to "Feed the Beast". And you can measure, what is the current interest of your growing readership. Measure it, not to get frustrated but to focus your topics more to your audience. Google Analytics helps a great deal and it's free.Amplify’d from technobabble2dot0.wordpress.com
A common mistake people make is that people live in a “field of dreams” world whereby they think that simply blogging about a subject will make people come and visit. Blogging is great for telling prospects about what you are selling but it does not bring people to your site.
In fact a blog is a focal point and acts as a base of operations for communications. Even though you may use Twitter and Facebook there still needs to be landing point – a place that people end up when they click on the link.
What’s more a blog can also address questions or concerns your audience find important. By all means people use amplification tools like Twitter and Facebook to draw their attention to your blog post, but the thoughts reside in one place.
SEO is also vital. New, focussed and relevant content will always be picked up by Google which will in turn bring extra traffic. It is here where the second stage of engagement takes place – directly on the blog. This is often more in-depth and focussed than through other channels like Twitter. How often have we all felt that 140 characters is not enough to give a detailed opinion. Facebook too has its limitations – even though you can write as much as you like, many find lengthy wall posts unappealing – it really is a case of the right message for the right channel.
