Running a blog on your website is a fantastic way to keep your business current, relevant and top of mind with your customers.
These days, no matter what demographic you’re in, a large percentage of your customers are spending time online. And blogging has proven to be an excellent way to reach your customers when they’re online, re-enforcing your brand message in a meaningful, informative way.
Here are some compelling blogging benefits to consider:
Blogs are Excellent for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search Engines favor websites that update their content regularly. In fact, fresh content is one of the most powerful search engine optimization (SEO) techniques you can use to boost your search engine ranking.
Blog often enough about topics relevant to your target audience and you’ll soon find your website appearing high in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords they’re searching for.
And high search engine ranking is one of the best ways to get visitors to your website.
New Visitors
Generating new visitors should be a key consideration when you’re blogging. The idea, after all, is to expand your business reach as far as possible. New visitors to your site can be tracked and analyzed with a powerful free tool called Google Analytics. Google Analytics shows you important statistics for your blog or website such as how many new visitors you have each day, how long they stay, what they look at and even where in the world they’re coming from!
Knowing who your new visitors are will assist you in tailoring content to the needs of your potential audience. Analyze your traffic. Adjust your content. Align the content of your blog with your target audience and you’ll turn new visitors into loyal readers in no time!
Feeding your social networks
Blogging and social networking go hand in hand. You blog to produce useful content for your readers. You can then use this content to feed your social networking sites with quality material and expose your valuable content to an even wider audience.
While it’s fantastic to be promote material from others online, don’t be afraid to promote your own content. As long as you’re not broadcasting your own messages all the time, others will be genuinely interested in what you have to say. In fact, chances are, if people are following you on at least one social network, they’ll also be interested in what you’re writing on your blog. And by nature, social media users are much more likely to share your blog posts with their networks too!
Due to the global popularity and sheer size of the most popular social networking sites, content published on these sites typically ranks very well in the search engines. In other words, your blog posts might get found via links on Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook in addition to people searching specifically for your blog.
How Much Time Does it Take?
This is a central question for anyone who is hoping to blog. We’re not all word-smiths. It’s hard to justify spending 4 or 5 hours on a blog post that might not even reach the 500 word mark. Can you justify your time blogging when there are other things you could be working on?
This has a lot to do with your level of enjoyment. If you genuinely want to be sitting down typing for a couple hours and sharing your interests with your network, fantastic! You’ll get a lot out of your blogging experience.
But if the idea is just to have fresh material and a few links, you do have other options. You can employ other people to blog for you, or you can quote other content, re-publish articles in the niche of your business or focus on micro-blogging (ie: Twitter) and share content rather than producing it.
Content is (still) King
Blogging is not a fad. In fact, people will always crave compelling information that’s relevant to them. Blogs provide your business an outlet to convey that information where and when your target audience is looking for it.
Have you recently started a blog? Why not tell us (and the world) about it by leaving a comment (and a link to your blog) in the comments, below.
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