A Penny For Your Business Blog

"Since 2006, the production cost of a penny has actually exceeded one cent," Clay Wirestone reports in Mental Floss Magazine. What’s more, according to MIT biophysicist Jeff Gore, "The time we spend searching for and paying with pennies costs the American public some $10 billion a year."

As a freelance blog writer, I’m on constant alert for interesting tidbits and ideas to include in writing for business. But never having devoted much thought to being either pro-penny or anti. I was amazed to find there’s even a Facegook group of Citizens for Retiring the Penny. Bottom line – the sum of the value of the zinc (which makes up 97.5% of a penny) and the value of the half percent copper in the coin exceeds the value of the penny itself!

Reading all of this eye-opening trivia, I couldn’t help comparing the penny, our smallest unit of commerce, with the word, our smallest unit of blog content writing. And words, of course, are what I talk about in corporate blogging training sessions and what I use as tools in providing blog writing services.

See, according to the anti-penny faction, pennies no longer facilitate commerce, now that inflation has decreased their value so much. (‘Course, had my Grandma been alive to view the video, she’d have been quick to point out that saved up pennies DO have value when exchanged for a dollar, which still does facilitate some commerce!)

So, going back to the parallel with blogging, as you continue to "save up" words, and particularly words in keyword phrases, you not only exceed the value of that single blog post, your entire SEO marketing blog gains incremental value. Lindsey Bailey of Compendium Blogware lists reasons why corporate blogs are great for organic search (recent, fresh content, keyword density, and age. in other words, as you add each new post to your existing corporate blog, the older posts remain, so that you’re literally adding to your "equity" in each of those keyword phrases.  (Grandma, you’d love this.) If you’d saved up 100 pennies and exchanged them for a dollar, then spent the dollar, you’d get a dollar’s worth of value.  But with keywords and blogging for business, your business benefits from those older incidences of keywords again and again and again.

Yahoo!small business explains there are three categories of keywords:

• Generic – these keywords are the most basic words that describe a product or service (such as "digital camera" or "accountant".
• Descriptive – these keywords have adjectives to narrow the focus, such as Indianapolis accountant, or "two-mega-pixel digital camera".
• Targeted – these keywords apply to only one product or service, such as "tax accountant" or "Coolpix 2100".

Beginning to see why my comparing words in blog content writing to pennies isn’t quite as far-fetched as you first thought?

Penny for your blog?