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Blog, blog, blog!!! There’s so many rumors out there about blogs, so in this post we’re going to explain what’s fact and what’s fiction as well as outline a few best practices for blogging as a business owner.
First off, I have to say that having a blog is critical to any business these days. Whether you update it once per month or once per day or once per hour, you absolutely MUST have a blog. So step 1 is get a blog! It isn’t as expensive as you think, we typically can install a blog on an existing site for between $200 and $300 and it will match your site exactly.
Now that you have a blog (and the majority of websites designed in the last two years should already have a blog built in, you might not even know about it in some cases) let’s move on to step 2 which is adding content to that blog. I myself am guilty of not always blogging as much as I should, so to act as motivation for you (and me) here’s some statistics from a recent study about companies that blog:
65% of internet users read a blog, many of them read multiple blogs every day
Companies that blog at least 20 times per month generate 5 times as much website traffic
Companies that blog at least 20 times per month generate 4 times as many leads
Companies that blog at least 5 times per month generally see SEO results in about 20% less time than those who don’t blog
Okay so now we see how important it is to update your blog, and to be honest it’s tough for me to blog 20 times per month but I try to have at least 2 updates per week. As a business owner I suggest you blog at least 3 times per month, but the more frequently you can blog the better.
Now that we know how often to blog, we have to make sure we follow step 3 which is putting out quality content. You can’t just write about any junk under the sun and expect people to read it, share it, and link to it. Ultimately the purpose of a blog is to generate buzz and traffic to your site which is done through your blog posts ranking in search engine results, through people sharing your post on social media sites, and through people talking about your blog post and manually sharing it with others. If your content isn’t worth reading, then it certainly isn’t worth sharing or ranking in search results. It’s often tough to think of ideas about what you can blog about, but here are a few basic tips for that as well:
See what your competitors are doing — no I don’t mean just steal their ideas, I mean read their blog posts and become inspired about a related topic to write about
If you are always asked the same question, write a post about it and explain it in great depth
Don’t be afraid to tute your own horn from time to time. It’s okay to occasionally blog about your products/services and what sets you apart from your competitors
Now the last step to this puzzle, step 4, is to make sure your blog is setup properly to get traffic. That means having social sharing buttons on the post to allow people to easily share it and it also means having your site properly optimized for SEO to make sure your blog posts will naturally rank in search results without much SEO effort. I know that my posts nearly always rank on page 1 of search engine results just because my site is properly optimized, which generates a good amount of traffic to my website every day.
If you don’t feel like you have enough time to blog, you can have an employee do it for you or you can even hire us to do it as we normally produce high quality content for many of our SEO clients as an add on service. The bottom line is make sure you are getting new, fresh content on your website regularly and it truly will start to pay off and compensate you for the time you put into it.
Brendan Egan