Right on! Have had good success convincing this angle for commercial website clients as the best way to launch their site and pre-sell their products.

Not to mention it adds to the project bid when handling the web design and seo... ;)

I think having a blog on my site would be awesome. I currently have a basic java server side site with JSPs and servlets. Is there a blog component I could easily integrate into my site that any of you know about?

Thanks,

Jeff

Funnily enough I had written a draft post about this exact topic on my blog over the weekend as we're going to be using it for an email marketing service we're launching in Oz shortly. Excellent points Aaron as usual.

Hello Aaron, thanks! You have made things very clear for me. On my Pune Real Estate Blog, i was thinking on these lines. But i was not sure about the success. Because all most all website/blogs are typical product and manufacturer oriented. Fortunately , i have my own client base (who are supposed to be the readers of my blog) so i could discussed with few of them. Surprisingly, they expressed something like this only! But your professional opinion has given me the confidence to go ahead and invest. Thanks, once again!

Fantastic topic, Aaron & a point many people seem to miss.

I think two more advantages are:

BIAS - people are less likely to perceive you as biased (whether you are or not) when you're not just pushing products.

MOTIVATION - there are many more reasons to visit an editorial site (education, information, entertainment, opinion, etc) than there are to visit a strictly-commerce site.

I think many of these advantages can be gained by existing commerce sites too. Many are pitched as 'products-first' or 'products-only' sites, whereas if they repositioned themselves as editorial/informational sites first & sales sites second, they'd do much better.

I hope everything's going well with you,

daniel

Interesting.

I particularly like the last bullet. You can blog about something you want to learn about.

Blogging is like research and development with direct public feedback. Nice combination. Its like testing the product while you develop it.

That's exactly what I think and what I'm doing right now for my company ;) that's funny. But I've to say that creating content is good for SEO but good too to create a new perspective on a market if you manage to create an authoritative content. ;) This project begins soon for us. For now I only maintaining my blog on net business and design. And by the way I really love your book. I discovered it lately and I've read it in one day ! Now it's on my office close to my hand ;)

(just to be precise : i've printed it ;) )

It would be perfect if a kind of structure that fits for every topic would exist. Structure means in this case: You ask 10 questions and can cover every new topic as a whole that way. Or you ask 20 question.. whatever. You just have to predefine a set of questions that fits for all new topics. Do you know what I'm thinking of? Got some idea on this?

Isn't this basically the one principle you often mention: "Build a site and monetize it later, AFTER getting links and exposure"?

Great post, short and sweet.

I see blogs as pre-selling your future commercial site :)

Great post. I think forums work in a similar way for some industries. Many people with the same interests create useful, timely content that a corporate website can't match. I prefer forums because I don't have the talent to blog :D But I am trying to change that.