Most businesses would benefit from adding an active blog to their website. Exactly what is a blog? A blog is simply a series of short posts, articles, or news summaries, usually on a specific topic. This article is a blog post for my website.
There are two major benefits to blogging on your business website – improving search engine rankings and building credibility with your prospects.
Improved search engine rankings:
Good blog posts add new content to your site that support your keywords.
An example: Lee has a standard website to support her organic turnip business. It includes the usual about us copy, benefits of organic turnips, and shopping cart. But after that, the site doesn’t change. If you come to her site there is a limited amount you can learn, and no reason to come back unless you want to buy more turnips.
Now imagine Lee add a blog to her site and starts posting articles on organic turnips once a week. She now has a reason to invite organic turnip fans to follow her blog via RSS or email. Now her site has fresh content for Google to read — which hopefully has new content using her keywords. Now her followers have something to return for, and something to link to in their blogs, or to refer to their friends. With these additional posts she now has more keyword content and incoming links to improve her Google rankings in the highly competitive organic turnip industry!
Building credibility with prospects:
Good blog posts help you build credibility with prospects and reinforce your expertise with clients.
Blogging lets you transition from “salesperson” to “consultant”. Blogging lets you provide education and promote your product without hardsell tactics. When Lee adds blog posts on her site about new ways to use organic turnips, or disaster stories about “non-organics”, or how-to articles — all these are building a following of fans and slowly building search engine links and content depth that a shopping cart site will never have. People who weren’t even looking to buy will find her articles on Google searches and quickly see the depth of her knowledge and passion. She can establish herself as the expert while she is positioning her product and building the need.
Writing “good” posts:
Good blog posts educate or entertain your target market. They have valuable content that “organic turnip lovers” will want to share with their friends. If your blog is just personal comments and a diary of your life, it may be entertaining, but it won’t be forwarded or linked to other turnip lovers. Good posts reinforce your keywords and major topics. You don’t have to be a great writer to create good posts, you just need expertise and a passion for your subject. Give it a try!
