Blog as if Your Business Depended on It!

You’ve no doubt heard about blogs and blogging – unless you’ve been living as a monk in a cave – and the power of this media.

And yet, you still have not started a blog because you still believe blogs are on-line journals written by and for teenagers as a venue for their angst-ridden transitions.

Well, maybe that’s how it was in blogging’s early years.  I hate to break it to ya, but this website is a blog – and there’s no teenage angst-ridden journal-writing here.

So .. why should you blog as if your business depended on it?

Firstly, search engines currently love blogs.  When blogs reached the tipping point the search engines realized that blogs were an important indicator of information popularity.  The theory goes that a blogger’s product  review is more honest than a review of the product on the manufacturer’s site and therefore should be weighted more heavily.  Now, exchange the word “product” with service, celebrity, movie, album, etc.  That’s why search engines love blogs.

Secondly, search engines – and your visitors – love fresh content.  As a society we are very interested in the next big thing.  Typically bloggers are at the b-leading edge of whatever they are interested in; be it books, music, porn, celebrities, the environment, etc. I always advocate a fresh content plan to my clients regardless of how their site is designed … especially on the home page.

Think about your own web activities … if you like a site you likely bookmark it; then you return to it every so often.  If nothing changes on it you stop going back to it as frequently until, eventually, you delete the bookmark.  If you want your customers to keep coming back you have to give them a reason.

Thirdly, blogging helps you connect with people – your clients, your customers – on a whole different level.  It feels more personal.  It IS more personal.

This is part of the overall internet strategy I’ve written about before.  Be Social.  Connect.

Fourthly, blogging helps support the optimization you’ve done on your main site by generating MORE content, utilizing your keyword list, and reinforcing your net presence via the page rank perks you get form having a blog.

Next week, I will be discussing the pros and cons of an internal blog vs an external blog.