Any website can benefit from having a blog. Blogs are a way to take a less formal approach to communicating with your customers and potential customers. It can be a forum of any combination of information, announcements, advice, opinion, anecdotes, polls, or outright humor.
The rest of your website could stay absolutely unchanged for years, but the blog section should be renewed often enough to keep visitors interested in coming back. The basic “chore” is to write a post of at least 300 words, and perhaps as much as 2,500 words or more. Feel free to add pictures or graphics, as well. WordPress is perhaps the easiest website forum for non-programmers to add new material.
How Adding a Blog Can Help Your Business:
Customer Communication
Every business needs to communicate with its customers and potential customers. In today’s digital world, the best way to reach out is through the Internet. More than half the population carries an Internet-connected phone, and even more have desktop and laptop computers. Radio listenership is down, TV commercials are routinely skipped over, magazine and newspaper ads are largely missed, and fewer people reference the phone book every year.
Websites and social media are the hangouts of tens of millions of your potential customers. This is where you can let them know that you’re thinking about them. This is where you can show them what you know about your own business and how to can help them. Write blog posts that make them feel good about themselves and about you. Give them information that will help them. It’s only natural that they might feel inclined to appreciate your openness and trust your product or service that much more.
Water Cooler Chat
Any way you put it – chatting around the cracker barrel or pot bellied stove, water cooler banter, Monday morning quarterbacking – the power of person-to-person communication is fantastic. Grassroots word-of-mouth can carry your message far and wide. To many people, hearing it through the grapevine gives more validity to your message than seeing it in an advertisement. It comes across as a personal endorsement.
While social media forums like Facebook and Twitter can also bring your personal message to the masses, stating it in a blog post on your own website gives it a permanence. Your posts are buried in a deluge of other online social chatter. They’re in a nice comfortable place for all to see at any time. People know that your website is the place to go for the most direct connection to you – that is, until they decide to visit your physical location, if you have one.
Better Presence in Search Engines
On a purely technical level, creating new blog posts is the best way to keep search engines aware of of your website. Search engines like Google and Yahoo and Bing are always checking existing websites for new content. Once they find the new content, they add key words and phrases from that new content into their search parameters. This means that if your website never mentioned kalimbas made from coconuts, someone searching for coconut kalimbas would never find your website. But if you write a post mentioning coconut kalimbas, suddenly people searching for coconut kalimbas will find your website. More keywords means that more people will see your website in their search results.
Conversely, if your website never displays new content, search engines will notice that too. In this case, your website will start slipping down in search results, as it will be perceived as losing freshness and relevance. This is Search Engine Optimization 101.
A Softer Self-Promotion
Many potential customers are turned off by the hard sell. Blatant self-promotion might be your first inclination when you finally get the attention of a potential customer, but when writing a blog post, please consider delivering a softer sell instead. Your website is already maximized to explain your product or service. Let your blog posts express nuances of personality instead.
While every post is, in fact, an advertisement for you, they serve better as free advice or information or even just musings. It may just describe a personal experience you once had, or address a current holiday in an amusing way. Posts can be quite endearing or enlightening without ever mentioning your product or service. If people relate to you, they’ll relate to your business. Show them that you’re not just a company name; you’re a person just like them who feels their pain and offers a solution when they’re ready for one.
Give and Take
Remember to leave the Comments section open. Let your readers have a voice, too. Also, try to respond back whenever someone takes the time to respond to your post. Some social give-and-take can easily escalate to long-term relationships.
Web Content Store can provide fresh, original blog posts for your websites designed to meet your specific needs. Contact Us to get started today!
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