To Blog Or Not To Blog

Blogging on your website is not only a fun way to express yourself but it can connect you with new friends, potential clients, and increase your site traffic. You can really increase traffic when you post blog entries that contain unique content that no one else is writing about.

If you’ve got the only blog post in the world about albino cats living on a small island off the coast of Indonesia, and then coincidentally Bonno takes them up as his new cause, your blog might suddenly get a ton of hits. This is great! Now you’ve got lots of new readers who may have never found your site otherwise.

Randfish writing on the SEOmozBlog makes some great points about why you should blog. Here’s an excerpt:

• Codify Your Thoughts
  Writing forces you to succinctly, accurately describe your point. Blogs are short form and often contain a single serving of news, opinion, analysis or recommendation. This style provides an easy entrance to the world of journalism & writing…
• Build Name/Brand Recognition
  …blogging well builds credibility and creates a readership of devotees…
• Prepare for a Book
  A blog is an excellent way to display and practice writing skills and to show a potential publisher that you’ve developed a rapport with a built-in audience, likely to buy your book…
• Grow Your Business
  Blogging has brought SEOmoz an incredible amount of business inquiries over the last 3 years, and the rate of emails asking us for assistance accelerates every week (last week, I counted more than 2 dozen unique requests, all of whom I sent here)…
• Share Knowledge
  …’if you share, you always get more.’ Blogging carries that mantra, too…
• Bolster Your Resume
  A successful blogger with a considerable readership is a powerful addition to any company, particularly one who’s seeking to build branding over the web…
• Create a Personal Voice
  …The less formal, more conversational style is an excellent way to truly connect and build fans of the brand.
• Connect with Industry Leaders
  …if you’re looking to build a rapport with the giants of your field, building a blog readership base (while easier said than done) is remarkably effective. Not only can you develop relationships with industry leaders, you yourself can become one…

Read the rest over at SEOmozBlog ->

Green Web Hosting

Our website is hosted with Dreamhosst, who pride themselves on being 100% carbon neutral. 

We’ve calculated the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use - paper in the office, electricity for our servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.

When we learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes we realized we had to do something to neutralize our emissions.

With a bit of research we found the most effective approach begins with resource conservation: turning off the lights, reducing travel, printing on both sides of the page. Efforts are being ramped up here daily to do what we do with less. The next step is to use clean, renewable energy. Without the option to put up solar panels or connect with a green power utility for us this means purchasing Renewable Energy Credits. Finally, to neutralize those unavoidable emissions we’ve invested in Emission Reduction Credits (a.k.a. “offsets”) which guarantee our remaining impact is effectively erased.

They also have incredible prices for the amount of server space and bandwidth they offer in addition to an awesomely designed and easy to use control panel for managing your services. We highly recommend them for your hosting needs. Check out their site for more info ->