DMR #7: Rich Brooks – Is blogging still important?

David Bain: What’s the difference between a website and a blog? What’s the best setup for a blog in 2014? What’s the future for blogging? Those are just three of the questions that I intend to ask our special guest today, Rick Brooks. Rich, welcome to DMR.

Rich Brooks
Rich Brooks

Rich Brooks: Thank you very much for having me. I’m looking forward to it.

David Bain: You’re welcome. Rich is president of Takeflyte.com, a web design and internet marketing agency based in Portland, Maine. He’s also founder of the Digital Marketing Conference, Agents of Change taking place just a couple of weeks after this interview is published. Rich, when I ask you what subject you wanted to talk about today, you said blogging. Why was that?

Rich Brooks: Well, I still think blogging is a critical part to any small businesses online success. I know that social media gets a lot of the attention these days; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram. Those are sexy topics, there’s no doubt about it. But so many of these tools are really somebody else’s tools. You’ve heard the saying before when you’re publishing on Facebook, you’re actually working somebody else’s land. You should always be building your own house on your own property. For me, one of the big reasons why I think blogging is so critically important is because really is to steal a line from my friend, Denise Wickman, “It’s a home for your intellectual property.”

While I certainly go out and I use social tools like Facebook and Twitter, I often try and bring people back to my blog where I can do a little bit more education and go a little bit deeper than 140 characters might allow me to. Also, before I got into social, I was really into search engine optimization, SEO. For me, that was actually the reason I got started in blogging because I wanted to create content that the search engines could find that would help me and my clients gain visibility in the search engine. There are a lot of reasons why I think blogging is still important even if it happens to be that the buzz and the attention might be placed elsewhere.