Blogs are fast becoming the number one form of business-to-customer communication. Not long ago, blogs were still considered ‘out there’; a wild-card tool for the political arena. However, it didn’t take long for businesses to start exploring the use of blogs on their websites. People started asking, “do we or don’t we”? If you are serious about an online presence, then a blog is as much of a “must have” as a Contact Us page.

Today, I’ll touch on the benefits of having a blog for your business. In later posts I’ll get into optimizing your blog for maximum traffic generation, where to host your blog, and what to write about.

Here are the reasons you need a blog on your business website:

• Increases your visibility to your customer: In the online world, a website can be very cold and impersonal. A blog can change that by putting a personality behind your business and making your business feel more “real” and “accessible”.
• Increases traffic to your website: Online, the mantra is “Content is King”. A blogging platform is the simplest way to increase the amount of pertinant & relative content on your website.
• Opens your site to a whole new world of directories: Blogs can be listed in literally hundreds of blog-only directories which are not open to traditional websites. The caveat is that you can’t just be pitching your business - but if you set up your business blog as a valuable tool for your customers, your blog will be accepted by blog directories 8 times out of 10.
• Search Engine Optimization: A blog optimizes your site for the search engines in SO many ways. In an upcoming post, I will cover the details of optimizing your blog. Most importantly, a blog enables you to create content on a consistent basis, which draws the search engine spiders to your site on a consistent basis. The amount of visits your site gets from spiders and crawlers is crucial to your online presence.
• Link building: Link building is a good side-effect of a blog, but it shouldn’t be enough to make you create your blog on a different domain. The trade off for a few links is all of the content you create on the side domain; so all that content is doing nothing for your site. Content will bring you traffic much quicker than links will. And you will still be building links on your site by hosting your blog on your own domain. Keep your content for yourself, don’t lose all those hundreds of keywords in exchange for a couple of incoming links.

I can help you hit google page one for your keywords in a matter of months, if you start blogging for your business now. So, next we’ll talk about keywords and content.

Please comment if you have any questions or input. Would love to hear it!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Blogging Mom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.