A white noise website, unless you’ve built a better mousetrap and have managed to get to the top of search engine results, means that you probably don’t have a lot of people dropping by. It’s static. Why should an old or potential client return when nothing ever changes?
By adding something as simple as a regularly updated blog, it’s been proven to drive traffic to your small dot in the dot-com world.
Not just content where you highlight new products. That’s important but, you want an ever-changing, snippet of education, information of interest and once-in-a-while something that grabs a bit of attention. An example might be, if you’re a car dealership, a post on “Turning Your Old Dodge into the Batmobile.”
Advantages to having a blog are:
- They let you spread you message to other upstream and downstream websites. Think shelf-space in your local market. If you sell soup, the more products, the bigger portion of real estate you own in the aisle. Look at Campbell. They’ve got the red-and-white canned, traditional soups. There’s the company’s brand of dry soups. You’ll also notice specialized soups that appeal to different ethnic tastes. And they’ve just introduced the “Bag of Soup” line that’s quirky, appealing to the youth market. That’s a lot of space. Let’s say another website links to a blog post on your domain. They’ve just sent someone over to sample your soup. Because of these third-party links you float higher-and-higher to the top of search engine returns.
- They allow you to build a crowd of regulars. By getting your audience to return again-and-again to read your blog, you’re turning readers into customers. Make sure you allow them to repost the particular article on social media sites like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. This is free advertising.
- Search engines love blogs. The more you update your blog — two-to-three times a week — the more that various search engines will spider their bots in your direction. The major advantage of this is the bots, realizing that you’ve got more than a boring site, will come back and scan your domain regularly. Moves you up the results ladder again when a search is made for a particular keyword.
- They let readers subscribe to your site using RSS. What’s RSS? It stands for “Rich Site Summary” and it’s a way for you to push or deliver regularly updated blog content. Another way to think about it is that RSS means “Really Simple Syndication.” Sort of like when you subscribe to a hard copy magazine or the daily newspaper. You’ll still want to send out the occasional newsletter, but by using RSS, your latest blog post is seamlessly send to the customer’s email inbox as fresh content is posted.
There are many, many more reasons why a blog can sometimes work better than the rest of the website. Need more motivation? Ring us up at Local Surge Media and we’ll fill in the gaps. We can prove blogs are vital to your Internet strategy.
Nothing like seeing the confirmation to help you land safely when you hop-off the fence.