What’s the Deal with Blogging?

I’ve had a few conversations recently discussing why blogging is valuable and how it fits into an online marketing program.  Those conversations inspired this article.

Here’s my take on blogging.

A blog is a type of website that makes it easy to add and share new content, and makes it easy for your web visitors to interact with you.

A blog can be the whole website, generally with a list of articles shown on the home page, or it can be part of a website where blog articles are shown on a paged linked to from the main navigation.

My blog at Grassroots Internet Strategy is the second type and it’s built using WordPress.Have a look and you’ll see we’ve got a “Home” page and “About Us” page like many other websites and a page called “Blog” that links to all our articles.

Think of a blog like a newspaper.  To fulfil it’s potential, it needs people to know about it and read it.  The more readers the merrier.

The newspaper might be all printed up and looking nice but looking nice is not enough. It needs to be read. When the newspaper is new, a few people might happen to see it at the newsagents, but nobody really knows about it until the newspaper owner markets it. Similarly, some people will probably find and read your blog articles but, for best results, you need to market your blog and let your target audience know about it.

You can market your blog by writing articles and sharing them via email campaigns and on social media like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  Ideally, some of your readers will like your articles enough to share them with their network.  Hence the word spreads.

Blog subscribers are like, well, newspaper subscribers.

Some people who read a newspaper subscribe to have it delivered regularly because they like reading it. Similarly, if people like a blog, they will subscribe so they don’t miss new articles.  Often you can subscribe via email or RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed.  One of the benefits of a blog is that new articles can be sent automatically to your list of subscribers without you doing any work. Services like Feedburner and Mail Chimp offer RSS feed.

Blog comments are fast-tracked letters to editor.

Not that long ago if you wanted to provide feedback on a newspaper article you had to post a letter to the editor.  Now, if a blog allows comments, you can instantly share your feedback with the blog owner.  Adding comments to blogs is a way to build relationships with other blog authors.  You can also promote your own website by adding your website address to the comment.

Why is blogging good for your business?

Regularly adding new, high quality content to your website via a blog is a great way to market your business online.  Spread the word by marketing your content as widely as possible:

• to email and RSS subscribers
• by tweeting the link to your followers on Twitter
• by sharing the link in your LinkedIn and Facebook status updates
• and by adding the content to article sharing sites like Ezine Articles.

Some of the benefits of writing and sharing content via a blog are:

• Establish your credibility by sharing your knowledge on your area of expertise
• Repeat Visitors – Encourage humans and search engines to visit your website regularly
• Targeted keyword placement – Each new page can include a targeted set of keywords, creating new opportunities for your website to appear in search engine results when people search on those keywords
• Inbound Links from other websites to yours are very important for improving your search engine ranking.  High quality content encourages links to your website
• Engage with your target audience by inviting and responding to comments
• Add new pages to your website – Each new article creates a new page of content, which makes your website bigger and more significant.

Ah the irony, if this was a blog I would ask you to leave a comment and tell me what you think 🙂