Believe it or not, we still run into life science companies who haven’t drunk the social media Kool-Aid. In other words, they don’t think their customers use the applications and are not ready to commit to spending resources on them. My answer to them? Everyone Googles. New media has a profound affect on the results from the tool that most of us use daily to get everything from news to recipes. Life scientists are no different, and find technical information, publications, and information about products using Google. Here, we’ll show you 5 ways to capitalize on the pervasiveness of Google drive more traffic to your website and to make broader improvements to your marketing process.

1. Simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There is a lot of low hanging fruit that we see many life science companies missing out of in terms of SEO. Surprisingly, it is left off of many web development projects. The web is full of quick guides, and here are our recommendations:
   • Do keyword research and find the top terms people are searching for.
   • Use the top keywords in the titles, content, and SEO summaries of each page. Always write for humans, not the search robots, as no robot will ever purchase a product from you.
   • Submit your website changes directly to Google so that it is always up to date on your content (this can be done automatically via programs that create and submit XML site maps).
2. Create a dynamic website. I like to think of Google as imitating a human in some ways. If you visit a website a few times, and it never changes, you assume you know everything that it contains, and there isn’t really a reason to keep returning. Google assumes the same, and that the converse is also true—it assumes sites with changing content are worth visiting and ranks them higher. Of course, there are many websites that try to game the SEO system, so random content is not acceptable, but as long as you’re writing real content for humans, you’ll do well. Examples include blogs, forums, and FAQs. We’ve also covered how making these changes won’t just improve SEO, they can also affect your bottom line. Running your website using a content management system (CMS) will help the marketing team make more regular updates.
3. Use Google Tools. The best things in life are (mostly) free, Google proves this with myriad applications available for improving your website and driving traffic to it. We could write a whole blog post on their tools, here is the short version of the applications we recommend:
   • Google Analytics. A no-brainer. Install a snippet of code on the pages you want to monitor, and get a wealth of information about traffic, keywords, conversions, and more.
   • Google Adwords. Drive traffic to your website and do research on keywords and Ad copy at the same time, and you can even look at what your competitors are doing. Get real time feedback on your customers’ interests with any size budget.
   • Google Webmaster Tools. This resource is a bit less well known and it is unclear to me why it is separate from Google Analytics. The two are intertwined, and by logging into Webmaster Tools, and installing the code on your website, you can access more features such as seeing how many/which websites link to your site (important for SEO). Also, you can set your site up to submit XML sitemaps to Google here as well.
4. Use Social Media. Google loves dynamic websites and it is becoming enamored with social media too. Why? Because with social media Google can take advantage of human brains to filter the increasing amount of information on the internet, much of it designed to fool search engines. Very few spammers can convince hundreds of people to ‘like’ or share their content, but a post that appeals to humans will be amplified in these ways. ‘Social search‘ is the term used to describe the augmentation of search engine results from a person’s online social network, it aims to give you suggestions based on what your friends and colleagues like. It is currently just a part of SEO algorithms, which we don’t have access to as they are proprietary, but this post shows some convincing data regarding its importance. Indeed, 60% of the results on the first page for a Google search of ‘Comprendia’ are from social media applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, showing the importance of content and activity on these applications. Google+, a social network from the search giant, launched in June 2011 and Search, Plus Your World was announced January 2012. Now, Google+ users will get Google search results that their contacts have recommended. We’ll admit that we haven’t taken to Google+ as much as we thought we would, but this change has big implications. As a company, you could directly influence the search results of everyone who has connected to your Google+ brand page (hint: get one now…). Now, while not everyone is sold on Google+, many have Gmail, and it is tempting to speculate that Google will someday leverage these 350 million users. Also, Google owns so much of our online lives that it is not inconceivable that they’ll find other ways to sneak into our search with acquisitions, etc.
5. Analyze and repeat. Here is the fun part. Everything mentioned in this post can be directly measured quickly, so you can track your progress and repeat what works. Here are analysis examples that also track ROI:
   • Track keyword performance and conversions, adjust and move into new keyword areas as necessary.
   • Determine how many people are clicking to your site and converting from social media.
   • Track the ranking of your site with keywords, your traffic, and determine whether it’s leading to more conversions.

   These are just a few possibilities, and in the process you’ll surely come up with new and relevant metrics to track and utilize.

There are many ways life science companies can leverage researchers’ online activities to help them and improve their bottom line. Also, we think you’ll find that by doing so you’ll get more feedback and ideas for directions to take with your product line and online activities. The costs for all the tactics we described are scalable and can be very modest. What are you waiting for? C’mon, everyone’s doing it…

The image for this blog post is based on a children’s book you may have heard of and it was created by my daughter, an aspiring graphic designer!

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You’ve heard that content is king when it comes to improving traffic to your website and generating leads or ‘converting’ visitors to paying customers. Relevant content will bring more people to your site through Google searches, and by engaging them they’re more likely to become customers. That’s great, how do life science companies find the time and material to add to their websites? As we’ve discussed before, life science companies have been generating great content for years, but it’s not always web-friendly. In this post, we list five great ways to add lead-generating content to your life science website. Having a blog is a great ‘catch all’ for this content, but you may find a way to work some of these items into your website without one.

1. Webinars. As we’ve discussed, webinars are a great way to give leads useful information while at the same time introducing them to your capabilities. While you don’t want to give away the secrets to your success, your company has expertise that can be shared, resulting in a useful presentation which may lead some viewers to buy your products or hire you for services.
2. Publication reviews. Many researchers are getting squeezed in different ways these days, two of the biggest are time and money. Reviewing an important publication in your field saves them both of these precious resources, and also shows them that you know the field well. Also, the reviews will be full of words relevant to your products and customer needs, improving search engine optimization (SEO) and bringing new leads to your website.
3. Application notes. These are nothing new to life science companies, application notes show an example of a product being used in an experiment. Here’s an example from GE Healthcare, and note it’s in PDF form, resulting in another step to download it. Think of the researcher looking for information on their smart phone in the cold room–will they take the time to download and view? Make application notes more accessible by converting them to html, and benefit from better SEO, as html is indexed by search engines more readily than PDFs.
4. FAQs. Think about the questions your technical service team answers over and over again, and how many people are also typing the same query into Google. Kill two birds with one stone by putting these online—you’ll answer your customers’ questions as well as bring new leads to your site. A quick Google search shows GE Healthcare’s on top of this as well.
5. Researcher profiles. Looking at independent science blogs can provide ideas for company blogs, and here’s a nice example of a researcher profile from the Protein Wrangler, a biochemist in Texas who we met on Twitter. The podcast he’s created might not be as friendly for SEO and generating leads, but a text transcript could be added. It’s a great way to show your connection to research thought leaders and to help the scientists out as well by highlighting their work.

While we’ve listed what we think are ‘easy’ ways to add content to your life science website, it will still require effort. However, the benefits of improved SEO and lead generation are worth it. When updating your website, make sure that you’ve integrated methods to capture the leads wherever possible, but don’t force people to sign up before they can view the content. Additionally, by making your website more informative and web-friendly, you’ll find your sales, technical service, and other teams will appreciate and utilize it as well.

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We’ve announced our Google Tools workshop webinar July 7th, and Workshop 2 is now available as a recording. Check out our workshops and training page for other offerings.

Wow two months since the last Sound Bytes! We’ve updated our look from 80′s mix tape to ’00′s iPod, here’s our most recent playlist of links and tips for life science marketing and social media:

1. EMD Millipore: How do you like them apples?

   This week at our San Diego Biotechnology Network event my good friend and colleague Steve Edenson from EMD Millipore sponsored, and he showed me their brochure for Lead Discovery services, the tagline is ‘at the core of your discovery’ and they’re a nice light green with apples subtly featured. Here’s the twist: it’s apple scented! Perhaps it’s a gimmick, but it makes it memorable and you could even argue that it could help with branding or even send a subliminal message. EMD Millipore also recently announced their new branding (PDF) after Merck KgaA aquired Millipore last July. I’m not sure how the marketing team came up with the apple scent, but it shows creativity–how could you distinguish your marketing materials? I’ve heard great ideas from outside our industry, perhaps ask your printers, vendors or consultants for ideas, or have a brainstorming session on a Friday afternoon with your team. I also like to keep an open mind when visiting other events such as home shows, etc., or even sorting through junk mail.

2. Twitter gives developers the bird.

   In our Twitter workshop last week (available on demand soon!) we emphasized that you should cautiously rely on the posting and analysis tools outside of Twitter, because they can be here today and gone tomorrow. Instead, you should start talking to your IT team now about creating archiving and analysis tools for Twitter and other social media. Why? Well, we got a good example this week, as Twitter told outside developers to stop making applications which they claim are confusing end users. These ‘confusing’ applications are in many cases more intuitive and useful than the Twitter web and search tools, which is why they are so popular. Big name apps such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck will likely stay, but this move is a harbinger towards more control for them and less functionality for end users, unless Twitter beefs up its development of tools. How does this affect the life science marketer? Twapper Keeper is (or was, depending on when you read this) a fantastic tool to see the content and users centered around an event or keyword, and Twitter is forcing them to shutter their most useful features March 20th. Get your archives while you can, and get those conversations started with your IT group (there is an open source version of Twapper Keeper they may be able to install for you)!

3. HootSuite launches more analytics

   If you use HootSuite for posting to and managing your Twitter accounts, check out their announcement about now providing more analytics. You can now get more information about your facebook page and Google analytics, and it may help you ‘close the loop’ from social media to sales so that you can measure return on investment (ROI) better. HootSuite is a big competitor for TweetDeck, this may make them ‘owl that’ in the battle for leadership.

4. Google tweaks its search engine.

   In an announcement in late February, Google announced some changes that should benefit the life science marketer. They’re cracking down on so-called ‘scraping’ sites which reuse content on an automated site in which the goal is more visitors and Ad revenue. You may have noticed these sites when searching for information about your brand or products. Hopefully, this will happen less often, and you may want to check your company’s PageRank or search results in general to see if your ranking has improved at all. I’d expect modest, if any, change, and you should also discuss these changes with your IT/search engine optimization group to make sure they are taking the changes into account.

The soundbytes tag on Delicious contains all links mentioned, as well as others we think are useful. Sign up for Comprendia blog email updates to get our playlists delivered to your inbox.

To share this post easily cut and paste: Sound Bytes: Links and Tips For Life Science Marketing & Social Media 3/18/2011 http://bit.ly/soundbytes0318

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know we’re crazy about word clouds, a way to visualize text data that is mostly associated with social media content such as in blogs. However, they are also being utilized in other areas, and were even featured on a recent cover of Science magazine. As part of our new Social Media Toolbox series, we’ll show you how to use word clouds to understand how your life science company is found and perceived by your customers through search engines.

Why do this? You of course know what your best selling products are. Do the needs or ‘pains’ these products meet align with the top searches that customers, or even non-customers, use to find your website? We did the below exercise with our partner site, the San Diego Biotechnology Network (SDBN), and made some useful observations. Below, we list the steps to create Google Analytics keywords word clouds, and show what can be learned.

1. You will need to install Google Analytics (it’s free) and have at least six months of data to do this.
2. Log in to Google Analytics and choose “Traffic Sources->Keywords” on the left menu.
3. Choose a six month period using the calendar menu at the top right.
4. Using the “Show Rows” menu at the bottom right, choose 250 rows.
5. Go back to the top and click on the “Export” button at the top left (just above the word “Keywords” above the chart). Click on “CSV for Excel” and download.
6. The Excel spreadsheet will contain your keywords (scroll down to see) in the first column, with the number of searches in the second. The first word cloud we’ll make will use the number of searches as a factor to determine the size of the words.
7. In Excel, create a column between 1 and 2 and fill each cell of the top 50 rows with “:”. This will allow us to cut and paste into Wordle with a “:” separating the words and their weight, a format it requires.
8. Open up Wordle in your web browser and choose the “advanced” tab. From Excel, copy rows 1-3 for the 50 top keywords into the top entry blank of wordle. The first few lines of our paste looks like this:

   sdbn    :    700
   san diego biotech companies list    :    477
   biotech companies in san diego    :    391

   The resulting word cloud is below (click to enlarge).
   
   From this cloud, we learned that the directory of San Diego Biotech Companies is one of the major reasons people visit the site. The weighting helps us to understand this well, as most other searches are dwarfed.

9. The above cloud considers the phrases people use to search, and is useful, but we also wanted to dissect the searches further and look at what words people use to search, taking advantage of analyzing the so-called “long tail.” For the next cloud, we did some trial and error and found that using the top 250 search terms worked best. Since we thought ahead and asked you to download these already, go back to your spreadsheet and copy and paste the 250 cells from column 1.
10. We used a program called Tagxedo to create our “long tail” word cloud, as it has more options. Here, you can play around with the maximum number of words in the cloud, and we won’t give you the options we used as it will vary. This is a very subjective process, so feel free to massage the data (it’s OK!) to look for trends. Our long tail word cloud is below (click to enlarge).
    From this cloud, we learned that the word “biotech” is used much more frequently in Google searches than the word “biotechnology,” and that networking is very important. These two insights would have been lost if we hadn’t done the long tail word cloud.

With just a few steps with these free tools, we’ve come up with some strategic and tactical actionable items for the SDBN from the Google Analytics word clouds:

1. Build upon the biotech company directory. Consider ways to get more ROI and/or leads out of this resource.
2. Choose the term “biotech” in web content over “biotechnology,” but include both.
3. Ensure that SDBN events provide plenty of networking.

The SDBN website is relatively simple with few products, so we analyzed the whole site, but Google Analytics has many ways you can slice and dice the data to meet your needs. You can also set up conversions to see which search terms are leading to sales. Do the word clouds for your brand, or product line, match what you expected? Your products may meet a customer ‘pain’ that you did not know about. Of course, the content on your site must provide ‘clues’ to the issues, one of the reasons we promote thinking about customer pain on a broader level. Word clouds are also great for sharing what you’ve learned with your group or the management.

This post is the first in our Social Media Toolbox series, and we also cover Google and other applications in our Workshops and Training. Sign up for email updates so you won’t miss any of our tips and tricks.

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Recently there were rumors that the social bookmarking site Delicious, owned by Yahoo!, was being shuttered, the final story is not in but the latest post from Mashable indicates it will go under. It made me think about something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. We’ve built Comprendia and the San Diego Biotechnology Network with the help of some great free or cheap tools. Here we list the best software and services and will, where appropriate, make contributions to them as we think it’s a good strategy to support them to ensure that they’re around for our business.

1. WordPress. If we didn’t care so much about style, we’d put this item in font 48, and we can because our website is built on this powerful, versatile, and free platform. In 2008 creating a company website solely from WordPress was a bit of a novelty, but we went for it and there’s no looking back, and we created the SDBN and OCBN sites using this content management system (CMS). WordPress is a frequent topic here on our site and we hope that the posts are helpful. WordPress is completely open source and you can donate to the WordPress foundation to help with development and education.
2. Gimp. I’ve been using Gimp, a free image editing program, for more than 10 years. It has many of the features of Adobe Photoshop that a non-professional needs and runs on most operating systems. There is a bit of a learning curve, but as with most free software there is excellent documentation and ‘howtos’ on the web. It’s definitely worth taking the time to learn. We make all of the images for the blog and the biotech networks using it, check out our guide for finding and adapting your own. Learn how to contribute to gimp here.
3. LinkedIn. We’re a big fan of LinkedIn for many reasons, you can read our past posts which may be helpful to you. We’ve created networks which connect thousands of biotech professionals and are used to effectively communicate events which strengthen relationships. Of course, LinkedIn is a business, and much of it is free, but we’ll support it in 2011 by having a Pro account. We are also in continual discussions with their product management team regarding group features, etc. which we hope will help their business model.
4. Google. By most accounts Google doesn’t need donations or PR from us, but we think it is worth a mention as a great tool for small businesses. You name it, they’ve got it: web analytics and advertising, shared documents, calendars, and sites, and corporate email. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon, so we think they’re a safe bet for your business–check out all their applications here.

5. WordPress Plugins. We’ve given you our list of essential WordPress plugins, which extend the functionality of our websites greatly, and there are a few we will donate to because they’ve helped us so much. One is cforms, which power all of our forms on the websites, from registration for events to questionnaires. It’s easy to use and you can even run your own polls. Another great plugin that we use, mostly on the biotech networks, is FeedWordPress. We use it to pull news from sites and feed it to both the blogs and Twitter (with help from an app called TwitterFeed, but they are not taking donations). Another great plugin is Redirection, which helps us make the ‘friendly’ or simplified URLs we can promote easily (and we use Bitly sometimes as well, which is external to WordPress).
6. Yahoo! We would be remiss to not mention Yahoo, the purportedly struggling company that is the inspiration for this post. It is of course a business, and perhaps you could argue that being charitable towards a business does not help them. However, the alternative is to continually replace these services with startups that come and go–you decide what’s best for your business. From the mail I use personally to Yahoo Pipes for RSS feed filtering to Site Explorer which helps with SEO to Delicious bookmarks for sharing and research to Flickr which we use for image storing and search, Yahoo has many applications which deserve our support.

Several of the free applications we mentioned here are made possible by the GNU Public License, a project which supports software developers and end users, accounting for more than 60% of the free software on popular download sites. You can contribute to GNU and the Free Software Foundation’s high priority projects if you want to help (and it’s cool to see what’s there).

We are thankful to these developers and communities who have helped us grow our business, and I actually became aware of them when I was working as an X-ray crystallographer many moons ago. Coincidentally while writing this post I got a message from Michael Chelen, a bioinformatician who wants to help me with some RSS manipulation–we continue to communicate with developers and help them when we can. The timing is good for monetary donations to your favorite tools, as you can write them off for your 2010 taxes.

Which free software applications would you deem worthy of donations and why?

To share this post cut and paste: Paying It Forward: Supporting The Best Free Small Business Tools We’ve Found http://bit.ly/f6kfsS

As consultants, we see that some of our life science and biotech clients are interested in learning how to ‘DIY’ (Do-It-Yourself) marketing and public relations items that were traditionally outsourced. We realize this need for smaller businesses who may have more limited budgets. We offer our suggestions below with the caveat that professional public relations (PR) and marketing firms do have a lot to offer as they have the experience and connections, and as we point out below, a sustained PR campaign requires significant effort. Our guidelines for sending a biotech press release are listed in chronological order.

Start with a message and a plan. The purpose of public relations is to help your company realize its objectives by being perceived in a certain way. For an example, a biotech company may want to be perceived as an excellent drug discovery collaborator so that they will be approached by potential partners. Of course, the perception cannot be far from reality. Once this message and its objectives are clear, a plan should be developed to meet this goal, and it will include other aspects of marketing such as conferences and product launches.

Form relationships with the media. It’s important to start this process early, as of course relationships take time. Due to the changes in the media landscape, publications are now more ‘hungry’ for biotech and scientific information, so they may welcome your ideas more readily. Part of your PR plan should include target publications in which editorial coverage (or ‘earned media’) will help you to achieve your goal. You’re likely also advertising in these publications, so ask your salesperson to connect you with the editorial staff. It also helps to review the editorial calendars of these publications, so that you can coordinate your schedule with theirs.

Make the release newsworthy. One of the results of the changes in the media landscape is that now that everyone can send a press release…everyone does, flooding the internet with commercial ‘news.’ Ask yourself before sending the press release, is it news? Putting out a string of press releases does not entail a PR strategy. If you decide your release does count as news, tie it into biotech business trends and life science research news. Send personal emails to your top targets, explaining to them why the story would be good for their publication. Or, better yet, call them; the most sought after journalists get many emails, calling may be a way to stand out. Consider embargoing the press release to your top targets as well, giving them time to cover the story in more depth, although this is not a guarantee you’ll get good coverage.

Use a press release distribution service. We’ve seen life science companies take the ‘DIY’ concept to the extreme, defining a ‘press release’ as a blurb on their website and an email blast. While you may have a terrific network and a great distribution list (which we’ve warned against abusing), for the time being, distribution services such as Marketwire (which is the service we suggest) will get your release in front of many people and also help you with SEO (search engine optimization). The cost will be between $500 and $1000, depending on the length and options you choose. If it sounds too expensive for the number of releases you plan to send, then you may want to consider that you’re sending too many.

Consider SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Is it your company’s goal to be the leading provider of kinase assays? Make sure these keywords appear prominently in your release, and that there are links to your website as well. As with many other marketing activities, we’re big proponents of using Google Analytics/Adwords data to find what your customers or target audience are searching for. This will help you to get the most out of the ‘Google Juice’ you’ll get out of your release, and many of the distribution services also have SEO tools to help you.

Use social media. You knew this suggesting was coming, if you’ve been reading this blog. Build your social media network so that you can send the information to people who care about your company’s news. As always, engage, don’t broadcast, and see our social media training and workshops if you need help. Using social media for PR could be an entire blog post so we’ll keep this short in anticipation of that…

Things will continue to change, and it’s possible that in a year or so we’ll adjust this list, perhaps making ‘social media PR’ #1. One thing that will likely remain the same is the importance of relationships in getting attention for your company’s news. As the ‘DIY PR Pro’ for your company, you should now consider this part of your daily routine!

To share this post easily, cut and paste: How To DIY Your Biotech Press Release http://bit.ly/dk6K7n

Almost every life science company we talk to about web 2.0 and social media has the same question: what’s the return on investment (ROI)? We’ve discussed that the ROI equation for social media strategies and tactics is the same, but that the ‘expense’ and ‘payback’ calculations will likely be different. In this post, we’ll discuss two reports which show that web 2.0 sites have increased traffic and engagement, and that customers who are engaged buy more. Together, they present a strong argument that adding web 2.0 features can directly and positively impact a company’s sales.

Web 2.0 sites are dynamic and interactive, and include sites which the user can add content to such as blogs, forums, and wikis. The first report we’ll discuss is titled ‘Traffic metrics and Web 2.0-ness‘ and it was published in Online Information Review from a group in Taiwan. They surveyed the online habits of about 1000 people and correlated metrics such as sites visited, page views per site, and duration per page on site with the degree of ‘Web 2.0-ness’ a website had.

The researchers found a positive correlation between the Web 2.0-ness of a site and users’ understanding of its content and the number of visitors to the site. In other words, adding web 2.0 elements and more content leads to stronger user engagement with the site and a related increased traffic to the site. One interesting corollary they discuss is the ‘double jeopardy’ small companies face: fewer products=fewer pages=less engagement. We definitely see this with smaller life science and biotech companies we talk to, and we have many ideas to help them overcome this issue.

You may be asking yourself, does increased engagement mean more sales? The second report is from Gallup and is titled ‘Customer Engagement–What’s Your Engagement Ratio?’ (Note: the report is a bit of an ‘infomercial’ but has good information). Gallup first looked at what they call ‘World Class’ companies, which rank in their 90th percentile, to determine whether they engage their customers more than the others. The result was shocking–the ratio of ‘Fully Engaged’ to ‘Actively Disengaged’ customers was ten-fold more for the World Class companies compared to the others. So, top performing companies have a higher ‘engagement ratio’–is this directly related to improved sales? Gallup has found through many examples and industries that emotionally engaged customers spend more and are retained more easily. Moreover, they’ve seen that companies can improve their business performance by increasing their engagement ratio. See the report for more details, as some of the details behind the statistics are not given and thus hard to summarize, but Gallup is a highly respected company and I’m sure more can be learned from them if you need more information.

Taken together, these two reports show that adding more web 2.0 features to your life science company website will lead directly to increased sales. What may be more exciting is that life science and biotechnology offers many interesting ways to add content to your site, and we’ve discussed that you may be closer than you think to making these changes.

Want to learn how to get there even faster? Attend our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop 2: The 4 B’s of First Party Applications interactive webinar. We’ll talk about web 2.0, blogs, forums, and wikis, and how to generate engaging content for life scientists. Also, check out our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Training page, we offer training and workshops on almost every topic, contact us if you don’t see what you need!

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Yes, I have a very large social media soap box, which I climb upon often to preach. One of the reasons I’m so passionate about talking about it is that it has many benefits that we reap daily. Also, unless you participate in it, it is difficult to understand why it is so powerful. Blogging is one activity that has clear benefits for a business, and we’ve outlined some of the most important ones below.

Opportunity. Comprendia realized this benefit almost immediately after setting up our blog in June 2008. I was invited to blog for the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) at the meeting soon afterward, and was also asked in 2009. From these great opportunities for exposure, to regularly receiving complimentary conference admittance, to having a good reason to talk to everyone from prospective clients to famous scientists, we’ve reaped many rewards from our blog.

Website SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I recently talked to someone at a biotech company who was puzzled by the fact that content on their blog was ranked higher in web searches than their website pages. Why does this happen? Search engines love blogs and tend towards ranking their posts higher than other content. Now, while getting traffic to your website is only part of the equation, continually creating fresh content for your blog and monitoring what posts gain the most traffic help you to understand your customers better.

Education. What’s new in your field, and what are your customers (and competitors) up to? Blogging is a great way to pull your head out of the daily grind and think about these topics, which are obviously very important for your business. We learn a lot not only in researching for our posts, but also in the feedback we receive after we post, and in participating in the blogging community for our field.

Enjoyment. I’ll admit it, I’m addicted to blogging. It allows me to express myself, begin interesting discussions, and learn what is important to others. The scientist in me likes the possibility of analyzing the information, the marketer in me likes finding the ‘perfect’ image for each post. Am I part of a strange new ‘blogging breed?’ No, if you’ve been following this blog, you know that I’m a strong believer that we’ve been moving towards social media naturally for many years. Some have postulated that traits that make people good bloggers are nothing new.

In summary? Try it, you’ll not only like it, but you and your business will benefit from it. You may even be able to add a few items to this list. Also, software such as WordPress makes it easier than ever, check out our guide to get started.

To share this post easily, cut and paste: Why You Should Be Blogging http://bit.ly/9vxSN3

We’re really big WordPress fans here. It’s free, it’s powerful, and it’s popular, meaning that it is constantly improving. Like any free software, however, it doesn’t come with any formal support or guarantees, so keep that in mind when considering things like security and backups. We recommend using the fully featured version of WordPress that is self-hosted, because there is much more control and flexibility, but you can also set up a blog at wordpress.com if you don’t have the capabilities (note that you won’t be able to add all of the plugins below). We covered the basics of WordPress in an earlier post, and provided some resources to learn.

Below is our list of plugins that we automatically install or activate for our own blogs or our clients. They are all available in the full installation, and the newest versions (2.8+) allow you to search for and add them easily via the ‘Plugins->Add New’ feature on the left menu of the Admin panel. Check them out and contact us if you need more help:

1. Google XML Sitemaps. An important part of your blog is to make sure it has good search engine optimization (SEO). Google appreciates ‘help’ from you in knowing when there is new content on your blog, and this plugin will generate a sitemap and send it to Google periodically. This will help your SEO, so we highly recommend installing and configuring it.
2. All in One SEO Pack. This pack makes sure that your blog content is optimized for SEO. It needs to be configured, as well, and is by no means automatic, read the documentation and do as you are directed to improve your SEO–this may mean adding content to each blog post, but it’s worth it.
3. Redirection. This plugin is handy if you want to make ‘friendly’ or memorable URLs for blog posts that you’d like to promote. For example, for our monthly events with the San Diego Biotechnology Network, we make the URL ‘http://sdbn.org/december’ for the December event, etc. This makes it not only easy for our members, but for me in promoting it on Twitter, etc. If you foresee needing this capability, add this plugin.
4. Akismet. This plugin comes installed as default, and it helps enormously to weed out spam. However, there’s a confusing ‘activation’ that you need to do for this plugin. You need to get an account on wordpress.com to get a key to activate it. If you have a self-hosted blog, you’ll likely not need this account for other purposes, so it’s a bit confusing, but activation of the plugin is worth it, as otherwise your email will soon be flooded with either obscene or vague, flattering comments meant only to promote the person who posted it.
5. WP-DB-Backup. It is very important that you make frequent backups of your blog, and this plugin will do that for you. A few caveats–make sure that you set it up and that the backups are stored outside of your ISP. Also, take the time to do an extra check. Make sure that you know how to restore your blog from these backups, and document a procedure for doing so. If your blog is hacked, or goes down, the last thing you want is to have to figure out how to restore it while you’re stressed out that it’s down. It’s also possible that this backup plugin is not best for your system–if not, check around for others.
6. TweetMeme Button. In order to get your blog more exposure, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to share your content. The TweetMeme button allows people on Twitter to share your posts using the button on the top left of every post (including this one). More sharing means more readers, which is always good, and as we covered in a previous post, making things as easy as possible helps as well.
7. Sociable. Along this same vein, the Sociable plugin allows people to bookmark or share your content in a variety of ways. Configure it with the services you think your readers use, and the options will appear at the bottom of each post (including this one). There are even options for creating PDFs and printer-friendly versions of your blog posts, which can help your posts to have more ‘spreadability.’
8. WordPress Related Posts. You want your readers to stay on your blog and read as much of your content as possible, right? Showing them related posts helps you with this. It’s pretty self-explanatory, check below for an example.
9. Twitter for WordPress. WordPress sites are by default dynamic, changing often, and this is essential for your website to be more ‘web 2.0′ and compete with other sites. A great way to show your readers that you’re active is to display your Twitter feed in your sidebar, as we do here.

That’s our list of essential plugins, and of course we use others depending on the situation, and we encourage you to browse the WordPress Plugins page for more ideas–they show popular plugins, which can help. Also, look at other blogs and pay attention to what ‘attracts’ you as a reader–chances are those features are a good bet on your blog as well.

Which plugins have you found to be ‘essential’? We’d love to hear, leave them below! The great thing about WordPress is sharing ideas and having all benefit from the collective knowledge.

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