The importance of blogging

28 February, 2011

So why is blogging so important?

It’s all about interacting with the World Wide Web, your audience, your clients and more so your potential clients.

• This is your way of showing off your personality – you write your blog and therefore the contents of the blog show yourself off.
• It’s a way of communicating with your existing clients, if your existing clients subscribe to your blog it’s a way of keeping them informed, keeping them engaged, keeping yourself in the front of their mind. Showing off your knowledge and ultimately getting repeat business.
• It saves times – a blog is another form of keeping notes, I use it as an archive for advice I have given in the past and for answering questions in the future. The next time someone asks me why they should blog I simply have to forward them a link to this post.
• It’s proven to get business, it makes perfect sense.
• It increases the amount of content on your website; we all know the major search engines prefer websites that are content rich, but more so ones that are unique, relevant and engaging. How do they know if its engaging I hear you ask, well unfortunately big brother is watching! The search engines know how long you spend on a page, the longer you spend and the more the click around the website the more engaged you are. Ultimately you have to make a blog interesting and engaging to your audience this has the knock on effect of pushing you higher in the search engines.
• Try to get people to comment on your blog, this increases the content on your site, gives you a chance to offer questions and answers, and again the more comments the more chance of someone else reading it.
• It’s a way of keeping ahead of the game, not all websites / business’s in your sector will be blogging.
• Its free!
• It’s a fantastic way to let people know about new services/products you may offer.
• You gain trust, respect and become an authority on the subject matter.
• It ensures that you yourself will have to stay up to date, which can only be a good thing, you will be forced to stay up to date with news, trends, events and you will have to research and then you can write about them.

But it’s not all about your existing clients, the search engines and potential new clients finding your blog. It’s about your content being shared in many directions.

You can automatically share your content as you post it, for example when this article is posted onto my website it will be automatically shared on some of the social networks

• Facebook ( see jrc.agency on Facebook )
• Twitter (see jrc.agency on Twitter )
• LinkedIn (see jrc.agency on LinkedIn )

The content is also available to people that want to subscribe to it, this blog is signed up to Feedburner and offers an RSS feed, which by the way, in my opinion is quite out-dated as I believe nowadays people need to receive it in there inbox. So not only can you subscribe to the RSS feed but you can subscribe via email.

You can also encourage people to share your blog by adding “tweet this” “like this” “email this” etc. links. This pushes your content even further out into the field, and as long as you always add a closing paragraph with a nice little link to your website it then potentially brings you a bigger audience and hopefully new clients.

So where do you come up with ideas on what to write?

Well another easy one!

• This particular post simply came from a client asking me about social networking, we all know it’s all well and good having a Facebook page or a twitter account, but we have to keep them updated for anything to come from it. So my point there was you must have content to post there. It them made me think, hang on a minute this is a perfect subject for my next blog! So every time a client or customer asks you a question or advice, think can this be my next blog article?

• Subscribe to relevant blogs / news / articles and keep in the know. Find relevant blogs that you can subscribe to, this will not only keep you up to date within your own business/field, but it will also give you the chance to get ideas on what to blog about, or it could simply be a blog sharing some recent news you have learnt about. For example one of my future blogs will be all about Google’s latest post all about removing the spammy websites from its index.
• For help on subscribing to blogs in your sector, google “your sector” blog and find some blogs that seem relevant, are interesting and are at the top of their game, and then subscribe, ideally by email but if they only offer RSS then why not use FeedMyInbox a service that turns RSS feeds to daily emails into your inbox!

Don’t forget writing a post can then lead in to future posts, for example this post brings the next question of “How often should I Blog” the pure fact I have just typed “How often should I Blog” means that Google may well show this page when someone searches for that phrase, so I am half way there. Again I am illustrating how blogging can increase and make rich the content on your site. Obviously I need to write an article on “How often I should blog” firstly to give advice, secondly to keep as a note I can refer back to and thirdly to appear high on Google when the next person asks Google the question!

In fact this one blog could also turn into any of the following blogs:

• What should be in my blog?
• How do I automate my blog and feed it into Twitter?
• How to automate my articles into Facebook?
• How to optimizse Feedburner?
• How to use FeedMyInbox?

“Simply by blogging, you come up with new ideas for future blogs.”

So there we have it, I hope you agree blogging is important, but don’t forget the 3 most important factors:-

1. Uniqueness
2. Relevancy
3. Engaging

And with this you will build reputation, trust and help keep your readers stay up to date on industry happenings and news. It will keep your site fresh and help you up the rankings, so don’t be left behind take advantage of something that most business’s don’t and start blogging today!

For further advice on web design, web development, SEO or website marketing contact jrc.agency now!

Oh and of course please comment, ask questions below 😉