To Blog or Not To Blog?
That is the question.
 
A blog’s purpose is pretty simple, to provide useful content for readers and consistently feed the site fresh and relevant content. Ideally, the post should contain keywords and phrases that your prospects will be searching for, as this will help your post gain organic positions.

To achieve effective results from blogging, it’s important to make weekly updates to ensure the site stays high and relevant among the top search engines. – I know, I know! Sometimes it’s hard to come up with topics for a new blog – most good blogs don’t talk about the company or the blogger themselves. When trying to figure out what to blog about, think about your reader (prospect/consumer). What are they searching for and what’s hot at the moment? Sometimes a good topic is to talk about difficulties and challenges most of your readers face. Example: if your clients often find themselves thinking if they should or should not blog, you could blog about the benefits of blogging. – do you get the picture here?

By blogging, you can also establish the company as an expert in the field. Writing good content that is relevant to your readers will help convey that your company and site are a valued, trusted resource. As you can imagine, by doing this, you will be bringing back your readers and encouraging them to contact you or your company.

So…. to answer the question, “To Blog!”

So you’ve finally bitten the bullet and added a blog to your website. Good for you! It’s about time!  As you probably know, a blog is an excellent way to add content to your website on a continual basis. In addition, the search engines love websites that have fresh, relevant content; this will help to improve your organic rankings, which is clearly a plus. Now you can begin to contemplate the following: What the heck do I blog about? How often should I blog? How long should my posts be?

Perhaps it might make you feel better to know that you are not alone with these quandaries. They are the most common obstacles clients are faced with when the topic of a blog comes up in conversation. This post will provide some suggestions to get you started on your blogging…

Let’s start with potential blog topics:

Anything Industry Related– This could include timely happenings in your business or niche. For example, if you were a florist, you’d want to be blogging about the upcoming Valentine’s Day holiday, as well as ideas on floral arrangements for that special someone.

Upcoming Events – An example would be if you are a hotel and there is a local art fair or concert taking place in your area. You could blog about these upcoming events that people might be searching for, as well as need a place to stay.

Crisis Management – In the event of a tragedy or a natural disaster, a blog is an ideal forum to communicate helpful tips and facts.

New Products or Services – This is a great way to spread the word about any new offerings you may have. An example would be if you now have ecommerce functionality, which allows website visitors to make online purchases, or perhaps you launched a new website. In either circumstance, a blog is a great way to boast about it!

Frequency of posts:

We typically recommend to our clients that they post a minimum of once a week, but more often is certainly preferable. It will depend on internal resources, as well as who will be reading your blog. An option is to have multiple members of your staff take turns posting to the blog. At the end of the day, only you can decide how often your blog will be updated, but in general, if you get into the habit of posting a minimum once a week, I’d say you are in good shape to start.

Length of blog post:

This, too, will depend on certain factors. Sometimes you will have less to say and as a result, will have a shorter blog (think 250 words). Other times you will have more to say and your post will be longer (600 words+). My advice is not to get too caught up in the length of a blog, but rather make sure that it is as relevant (to your business) as possible and the content is keyword rich.

Good luck blogging!

Here at MoreVisibility, I like to think we have a robust strategy in place for our corporate blogs.  Everyone in the company participates, writing one to two articles per month on a variety of industry related news, topics, and anything else we would like to share with our site visitors and the World Wide Web.  The last part of that sentence is important…our blogs are hosted on our site, but have the opportunity to get indexed by the search engines.  So while our blogs can be accessed by anyone visiting our site, we also can reach a wider audience when one of our blogs is indexed by the search engines.  In addition, writing the blog post is fairly easy to do – we all have tight deadlines and important projects to complete, but you can always find 30 minutes to write a blog, and that’s about as long as you need to write a good blog article.

There are many excellent reasons to start blogging.  In my opinion, there are two that stand out above all others as to why every company should be blogging, regardless of the product, service, or company size.  First, it is probably the easiest way to add content to your site.  For many businesses, there are multiple steps to adding a new page to their site, some of which involve a developer or web designer who may or may not be a full time employee of the company.  It is not uncommon to hear that it takes a week or longer to get a new page active on a website even after all the content for the page has been finalized.  If you have Wordpress installed on your site, for example, you can write and post blogs immediately.  Each blog post will have its own unique url, thus creating new content (and new pages) for your site is a breeze!

Secondly, the search engine optimization (SEO) benefits of consistent blogging cannot be understated, especially if you set up the blog the proper way as part of your main domain:  http://www.morevisibility.com/socialmediablog/.  Creating fresh, relevant, and keyword rich content on a consistent basis is an excellent way to improve your SEO results.  The very nature of blogging is to create fresh and relevant content related to your business.  Optimize your blog articles with keyword rich content and you are employing a solid SEO strategy simply by blogging about your business.

This all sounds very simple, and for the most part it is.  There is some technical work involved in getting the blog started, but once you do…put the pedal to the metal and start blogging as much possible.  You will find it is a simple way to add content to your site and boost your SEO strategy at the same time.

We are taught in school that it’s important to follow your dreams and try to aim toward a scenario whereby you enjoy what you do for a living. I don’t know many people who are successful, but dislike what they do.

With this concept in mind, and being sensitive to the fact that most professions require some degree of marketing push in order to drive new business opportunities, I encourage you to pick a Social Media channel and begin creating content that contributes knowledge to your industry, which in turn will benefit you and your company.

The two methods that top my list of ways to socially engage are Twitter and blogging. Twitter enables you to contribute useful snippets on business related topics that others are (hopefully) interested in. Be mindful though of blurring the line between business and personal tweets. Here’s an article I wrote about that last month.

Blogs, such as this one are an excellent way to communicate with individuals who are looking to learn more about a particular topic or who need the type of product / service that your company delivers. Blogs that are consistently maintained help establish credibility, which can go a long way in driving sales. Interestingly, our four blogs are the most well read sections of our website.

Lastly, as you have probably noticed, both blog posts and Tweets are now showing up in the search results. They are excellent tools to gain organic presence in the engines and drive non-paid traffic to your sites. Invest the time to find the social media channel(s) that best fits your style, post consistently and you will begin to reap the benefits that Social Media is delivering today.

Are you interested in starting your own blog?
If you are, there are a couple of things that you will need to consider.
Do you want to set up your blog as a user host platform or on a developer hosted platform? A lot of people tend to choose developer hosted platforms, since all they require is a set up of an account and no installation is required from the part of the user. If you decide to go for a user host platform, you will need to install your blog, which in many cases gives you freedom to change the blog’s style more easily and faster. Another important factor that user host platform blogging software provides is the implementation of SEO in the template of the site; usually developer host sites have a restriction when it comes to making the site template.

A question that might help you decide which blog platform to choose is: do you currently host a site? If you do, you can place blogging software in your current hosting server, meaning you will use a user host platform. This will allow you to keep all of your web content in the same location, which allows the indexing of your site and blog to be to the same domain and not two separate domains, allowing a better SEO implementation toward your main site.
If you decide to place your blog in the same hosting server, you should do a little research if you don’t already know about the type of server that you are using. Is it a Windows server or Linux? If it’s a Windows server you can use Engine.net, DotNetNuke or Subtext if using .Net. If you currently use PHP on the server you have a lot more options to choose from. If you are using a Linux based server, you need to check what has been installed on your server. Do you have PHP, Ruby on Rails, Java, or other languages or platforms installed in the hosting server? After having that information you can begin looking for the right blogging software for your blog.
If you do not currently host a site, you might decide to use a developer hosted platform, such as Blogger, wordpress (developer hosted version), or typepad. If you would like to use a user hosted platform, a lot of blog sites offer different hosting services. 

Another question that you need to have in mind is: Are you going to add widgets to your blog? If you are, you will need to conduct research on what kind of widgets you would like to add. Depending on the blogging software that you choose, the widgets will either be free or you will need to pay a fee for them. In the case of free open source software blogs, the widgets are usually free and there are more available. It is a good idea to keep in mind that there are widgets available for SEO implementation and these widgets should be a priority when creating a blog.

After gathering all the information needed and doing research on the widgets you would like, you can make the decision of which blogging software or sites is best for setting up your blog and customize it.

If your website is missing a blog, you are not taking advantage of valuable opportunities like branding, achieving additional organic results, an increase in site visitors and the list goes on.

I often hear from clients that they just do not have the time to maintain a blog. At the risk of sounding impolite, this is simply not a good excuse. There is always time to write a blog post, especially being that it can be on any topic which is relevant to your business or industry. Let’s face it; you know your business better than anyone! Here are some questions I commonly get asked when the subject of blogs is brought up in conversation:

How Often Should I Update My Blog? It is recommended to update your blog at least once at week with original content. This is basically how it works: Search Engines love new and fresh content. The more updates your blog has, the more often the engines will come back to crawl it. The more often the engines crawl your blog, the more organic results you will potentially garner. It’s as simple as that.

In addition, updating your blog frequently will ensure that your visitors/readers have fresh content to read and also makes your blog (and your site) appear to be more credible.

How long should my blog post(s) be? This answer is somewhat debatable. Some experts will say anywhere from 250 to 500 words. We typically suggest approximately 250 words. You want the blog to be short, sweet and to the point.

Does it matter if my blog is onsite or offsite? It does; especially from an SEO perspective.  It is preferred that the blog be placed within your domain to achieve the best results possible.

What type of blog software is recommended?  There are several blog software options available depending on your specific site setup. We typically recommend Word Press and utilize this solution on our own blog.

Implementing a Blog is a fairly simple and fast way to start generating new and relevant content to your website. Happy Blogging!