Let’s start with a little blog breakdown for everyone’s benefit. To start: What the heck is a blog?
Everyone’s favorite information source, Wikipedia, defines a blog as such:
“A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”
For anybody that is confused by the super fancy word ‘portmanteau’ it just means that they took the words ‘web’ and ‘log’ and mushed them together. So now that we know the ‘What’, we can move on to ‘Who’.
The ‘Who’ is You. Simple, but effective. As a business owner, it is important to maintain a relationship with your clients. In our fast paced world, it is difficult to add the personal touch that we used to provide. Since so many people gather information and form relationships on the web now, the blog has become the new personal touch.
In this small, virtual space, you can offer useful advice and make yourself a resource for current and potential clients. You can write about different ways to use your products and services in order to increase sales. You can write about how your cat ran out of wet food this morning and make yourself accessible as a human being to all of the people that visit your site. In all of these instances, you are forming a relationship with your customers and clients that can potentially keep them coming back for more.
There is an added technical bonus as well. Having a site that is frequently updated with relevant information is one of the keys to great SEO. That stands for Search Engine Optimization and it refers to where your name shows up in the lists on searches. Say you type your company name into Google. You scan the first page, scan the second page and finally find yourself midway down the fourth page. When people do a search of your industry, how far are they going to look before picking a link or trying a different search? Statistics say that the average person will not search past the first three pages. Search engines don’t like sites with old information so they look for frequent updates.
Blogs are very powerful tools that only require two things: your time and wit. Fantastically enough the format of the blog enables you to write 2 – 3 sentences and have that count as an ‘article’ of sorts. Everyone has time for 2 – 3 sentences a day. Of course, for those of you that are overachievers, feel free to extend those sentences into paragraphs and amaze the world with your prose and insight. The format is negotiable as long as the content is relevant and fresh.
To talk more about how a blog can work for you, please contact us at info@123shoot.com.
