Should You Add A Blog To Your Website

The short answer is yes. The long answer is you should, but you will maximize the value of adding a blog to your website by incorporating these simple steps:

Dedicate at Least Two Hours a Month to Creating Fresh Content

Creating new, relevant blog posts not only helps increase your percieved credibility on the subject, but can also lead to some long tail traffic down the road for your business. Let me explain:

Search engines crawl sites that consistently put up unique, fresh content more frequently. This is self-explanatory. The Googlebot is actually two unique bots with different goals. Deepbot tries to find new pages for the index and Freshbot is dedicated to finding websites that consistently update their content. Freshbot can only search so much of the internet every time it is run, so it makes sense for the Freshbot to make it a point to spend it’s time wisely. In this instance, why would bot waste any of it’s limited time crawling sites that haven’t been updated in the last 12 months, when it could focus more on sites that consistently put up new content?

Gaining Long-Tail Traffic To Your Website

If you think like I do, then you place a certain dollar amount to every hour that you spend working. You can justify the ROI on the time that you devote to blogging by seeing visitor’s convert on your website through your blog posts and here is how:

Use programs like Wordtracker or Google’s keyword tool to find the keywords that relate to your business that people are searching for and find phrases (yes phrases, odds are you won’t be number 1 for “tv’s” in this lifetime) that you can write a blog post about using your expertise on the subject. For instance, if you are a cosmetic dentist, write a blog post about the “most effective teeth whitening techniques” and use different variations of that phrase throughout the post. After a week or so, google the phrase to see where you are ranking for the phrase and use your web analytics package to see if you are getting traffic from these keywords. 

*Note: If you are not currently using a decent web analytics package (hitcounters do not count), then contact me immediately!!!

Use It As a FAQ’s Section On Steroids!

If your customers consistently ask the same questions, then write blog posts that answer all aspects of the subject matter at hand. That builds trust and confidence in you and your business. Also, if they are asking you these questions, then odds are: They are searching for these phrases as well (Refer to the previous section)!