So what is so great about blogging? We here about it all the time. We are told that it’s important to have a blog. But why?

From a technical point of view there is one main reason to blog:

Search Engines love it
If you provide links from your blog to your website then search engines, and Google in particular, will be happy. If you provide relevant and informative content and establish a good readership for your blog then any links coming from it to your site will be considered favourably by the search engines spiders. Favourable links are one factor which increases your website rating on the search engines which means you will be ranked higher up the list.

This is a very important reason to create a blog but it is by far the only reason.

Relationships
What blogs allow you to do is develop relationships with your clients and prospective clients. In an online world this is even more important than ever. In business, no matter how we couch it, everything is still about relationships. If you create a great rapport with your clients and prospects they are more likely to return to you than to your competitors.

Relationships imply give and take, don’t they? This is easy with a blog. People can make comments on your blog posts thus enabling you to keep in touch with your audience and respond accordingly.

Blogs are also a very respectful method of staying in touch as readers can choose whether they subscribe to feeds which tell them when you have added any more information. And respect, after all, is a very important part of any relationship.

How do you judge whether a relationship is working? You listen to feedback. This is easy to do with blogs as people are invited to make their comments. Ultimately you have control over whether people’s comments are published in the same way as you have control over whether you divulge information shared between you and your partner.

The other main reason for having a blog is the facility via which you can -

Share Information
Sharing information is important for business. It’s so easy and so cheap with a blog. The main platforms for blogging offer free access and they are also very easy to use without any technical knowledge. Even if you are a larger business this can be done in-house to save on costs.

Some companies are run purely from blog sites and it is possible to sell goods and services via this medium although it does require a little more technical knowledge than a straighforward blog.

Sharing information with your public is vital. They can get to know you, your company, your products and services.

The sharing of excellent information builds trust and rapport (back to relationships), the foundations of good business.

As blogs are written on easy to access platforms you can quickly pass on new information to your readers. You do not have to rely on web developers to make complicated and costly changes to your website. You can be responsive to changes in the marketplace and your readership.

Tags: Blogging, Search Engines

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Behavioural Marketing, Blogging, Google, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.