Harvard Does Content – You Should Too

Harvard University’s faculty of arts and sciences will start posting its professors’ academic papers online . This content can be crawled and indexed by search engines such as Google Scholar and can be freely accessed by anyone with an internet connection.The ostensible reasons for this move is to give academics more control over their intellectual property and to circumvent the spiraling costs of academic journals which traditionally disseminate such scholarly knowledge. One side-benefit, though, is that it will further enhance Harvard’s online presence as this vast knowledge repository will undoubtedly be a powerful search engine magnet.Your business need not be an Ivy League institution with a multi-billion dollar endowment fund to take a leaf out of the Harvard playbook.A blog-based website is the ideal vehicle for even the smallest of businesses to leverage its content. Blogs today are pervasive and open-source blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Movabale Type have matured into powerful and flexible content management systems.These platforms are capable of creating full-featured websites that are easy to update and fill with fresh, relevant and compelling content. Once setup and configured properly, you can maintain your website without needing any programing or HTML knowledge – posting articles, press releases or product information to your website can be done at the click of a button.An added advantage is the fact that blogs are inherently interactive. A blog-based website makes it easy to engage your customers in a way that static websites simple cannot. You can ask and answer questions, solicit feedback and seek suggestions. This can be invaluable in strengthening your business’ relationship with current and prospective customers.While it will take some time and editorial effort to maintain your online content, the results can be outstanding. A well-designed and frequently-updated blog-driven website can give a tremendous boost to your business’ online visibility and build your reputation as a credible authority in your selected niche.