The Importance of a Blog
A website these days is not just a fancy business card posted on a page on the internet. It is a porthole into how seriously you take your business. No longer is it good enough to have some kind of static holding page that was set up in 1998 and hasn’t been updated since. Your page rankings on search engines are directly linked with how much time you spend updating your site – so if you haven’t visited it yourself since 2006 don’t be surprised if no-one else is seeing it either.
A blog is a very simple way of providing frequent updates to your site without having to employ expensive ‘webmasters’ to continually change your content for you. Blogging started off for three main reasons:
- As a way of people establishing themselves as ‘experts’ in their field
- To share opinions and information
- To connect with like-minded people.
All of these reasons translate very effectively in a business environment.
It can also provide a unique ‘trust’ element to your business by adding human touch and personality, showing there are real people behind the business.
Most compelling of all it is THE most effective (and cheapest way) of making your website easy to find on the internet, as the more you refresh the content, the higher the search engines rank you. Now when I say cheap, there is still a cost. For blogs to be taken seriously they need to be written and researched well which can be time consuming, although creating a blog is not that difficult if you use the right resources online. There is a big difference between a self-indulgent rant, and industry defining news. If executed with some level of thought however, and they don’t need to be enormous long tomes, a good blog will give customers a reason to continue returning to your site, and passing your link on to friends.
It also has the benefit of allowing you to engage with your customers on a whole new level by encouraging them to comment on what you have written. This does open up an interaction that needs to be closely monitored (heed my words about ranting above) but can provide you with valuable customer feedback and opinions.
The internet moves on at such a pace that now one of the best Content Management Systems available is free and Do-it-Yourself. WordPress was designed originally as a blogging platform, but now operates equally well running websites. This means it works compatibly with your own website and can be linked easily, so that it becomes a seemless part of it. With this feature, bloggers are able to ease their transactions, and have stopped looking for paypal alternatives on the internet. Infact once you start using WordPress you may decide to recreate your website within in.
Here are few reasons why WordPress is so popular:
- There are thousands of themes you can choose from so you can pick a design that suits you and is not going to look ‘off the shelf’.
- It has clever plugin tools which allow you to add simple functions to the site without having to know how to program.
- It is easy to update – if you can type a letter into Word, full of expert advice and great information, you can type a post into WordPress and publish it on your site for all to see.
- Google – the biggest search engine in the world – loves it, even going on record to recommend it for business sites.
- There is a huge online community keen to pitch in and help you out if you get stuck.
- We use it, as do 8% of all the worlds websites
So the answer to the question – should your website have a blog? Well if you want to increase traffic to your site, provide your customers with easy to access and more importantly up to date information, and you have a bit of time to put into it, the answer must surely be yes.
By Claire Robinson, Marketing Manager Intelligent Partnership