More and more companies approach us with a straightforward, but somewhat unfocussed request:

I want to be part of this [the blogosphere] - where do I start?

What they are really asking for is web traffic, driven by a presence in the aggregators and search engines. And there is (potentially) a commercial value here which can be achieved by good quality content. (This has been the dream of content-creators since the web started). If your content is useful enough, it can get you links.

How do I generate useful content?

This is the next question, and for every customer there is a different answer. You have to figure out what your potential market is looking for, and then provide it. It can be your take on industry news, it can be news of your own products – it could even be aggregated content from elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Though originally we provided myWebFeeds as an entirely technical service to create RSS content, we are getting sucked into the business of offering consultation on blog content, and on offering aggregated feeds as a service. Our colleagues at weboptimiser told us recently that when they simply added an aggregated news feed to their site, their traffic doubled. That’s hard to argue with.