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At lunch the other day with a couple of serial entrepreneurs, questions came up about the optimum timing of product launches and web site debuts.  Inevitably, the conversation turned to the value of blogging.  Nobody denied the value.  There was, however, disagreement as to timing.  So when is the best time to pull the trigger on your new blog for your new company?

There are those who argue that, in the early going, time and energy should be devoted to customer- and product-development. Exclusively. That there are not enough hours in the day for everything.  We won’t argue. Still, in the web 2.0 marketplace, a few minutes a day, or even per week, during which you crystallize your thoughts and share them with your ecosystem is to our way of thinking not a bad use of time.  In fact, it can be a highly productive one. Why?  It forces you to “stand down” for a brief period and clear your head and think about things in a different way.  Yes, you can go for a walk or shoot hoops or jog or pound golf balls.  Or any number of other things that puts you into a different gear.  The thing about crafting a blog post, however, is that you can make that same shift AND get yourself published. This is no idle indulgence in vanity.  It can foment discussions that serve your larger purposes as you prepare your count-down to launch.

Almost three out of four start-ups die during their first five years.  We wonder, right along with successful entrepreneur Martin Zwilling how many of those failures had a blog.

To the extent your customers are readers today, you are a publisher.

“Marketing content” and “riveting quality” are rarely spoken in the same conversation.   Indeed the latter is typically invoked disparagingly, as in “The content isn’t exactly riveting”.  At Write Angle we’ve been at war with flat, yawn-inspiring content for years.  But this isn’t about us, it’s about you and your mission to deliver content that attracts, engages and retains visitors to your site and converts them into users and customers.  Marketing content can be more than good, it can be downright engaging, which is what you should be striving for at all times.

But there’s another quality right up there with engagement.  More is better today when it comes to getting found online and upping your rank on search engines.  And speedy delivery goes hand in hand with volume.  While “good” is good, when it comes to content good and fast is even better.  Says Kyle Monson, a former editor at PCMagazine now at JWT, “a company’s ability to speak honestly and quickly to its customers, fans, and detractors is a huge competitive advantage”.

Step one: recognize and embrace the publishing mandate of your enterprise which is the imperative of Web 2.0.  Back in late ’80s and early ’90s as technology pulled companies into the age of networks it meant that many of them were suddenly in the telecommunications business as much as the business of their category. Today, in the real-time world of Web 2.0, you’re in the publishing business.  Your customers and prospects are your audience.  How are you building, engaging and growing this audience?  How are your “ratings” right now and what can you do to improve them?

This just in from the research folks at HubSpot: the most valuable form of marketing content today is, in the opinion of marketers (who are measured by the quality of their content as never before), their blog.

And it’s true for B2B and B2C marketing.  Respondents in B2B marketing who were asked to rank various forms of content for value to their marketing objectives named blogs number one (39%), followed closely by webinars and virtual events (38%), white papers (31%), videos (23%), data-driven research reports (20%), user-created content (17%), white papers sponsored by vendors (10%) and podcasts (6%).

This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to the in-bound marketing world of Web 2.0.  Publishing a business blog offers the chance for marketers to keep content fresh, topical, personal and relevant the way no other form of content can.  And more is better, the way no other form can be.  The fresher and more frequent your online content, the greater your chances of being found online.

What form of content is most valuable to achieving your marketing objectives?  Is your blog as active as you suspect it should be? How do you stack up competitively in terms of posting?  What do your customers tell you?

By now, the importance of creating your own content and publishing it online via all social channels should be pretty obvious, but in case you missed the latest metric on social-media marketing here it is: HubSpot just reported that nearly two out of every three social-media messages today is a link to published content.

In other words, people pointing out to personal friends and business associates the material published by someone else amounts to a substantial majority of the information flow in social media.  The implications for marketers have never been clearer or more urgent: brands, whether B2C or B2B, are as much in the content publishing (and distribution) business today as they are in the business that generates their revenue stream.  Indeed, the publishing element of their business has become central to growing this revenue because it drives the visitors to your site who generate the leads that convert to $ales.

Moreover, whether people are sharing links to your content or embedding it into social networks directly, an overwhelming 96% of the sharing that happens online is of content, not websites.  The take-away: creating fresh content that encourages sharing  amongst your prospects, customers, partners and market influencers, specifically the stuff that addresses issues of keenest interest and urgency to them, multiplies their interest in you.  You’re in the conversation, which is the precursor to being in consideration.

Superior marketers have come to understand that pushing content drives in-bound marketing.  Fresh content — the more frequently published the better — facilitates online “find-ability”.  It’s  not enough to update your site once a quarter and step back to await the deluge of visitors clicking through your multiple calls-to-action.  Plant your content seeds in social media and get it shared among the right people on an ongoing basis.

What is your content strategy today?  What are your content publishing tactics?  How often do you publish the content your prospects and customers can’t resist sharing?

No matter what business you’re in, if you have a website you’re in the publishing business, too. And you need to keep what you publish fresh and new. Maybe not on a daily basis, but often enough to attract the right visitors. Which is what fresh content does. Here are a few things to think about:

1. Update content continually. Stale websites get pushed down in searches. The ones whose pages feature fresh material, images, links and keywords zip upwards.

2. You can’t blog too frequently. Not only is it an automatic content refresher, it personalizes your brand with personal outreach to customers and prospects.

3. Link back to your own site. Good way to increase traffic is to add in a few links back to your own pages within the text of every new page you create. Descriptive keywords draw search-engines crawlers. It’s another reason why blogs drive (attract) traffic.

4. Use video and images. Because their volume is so small compared to the text that’s out there, they are especially attractive to search-engine spiders.

5. Constantly track and analyze. Alexa and Google Analytics are simple to use and deliver invaluable information about your search standings and web traffic. Best of all, they’re free. Use them.

Keep in mind it’s not about quantity but quality. You want to see a growing number of the right kind of people. What are you doing to grow the right traffic on your site?