Are you blogging enough to help grow your business?

Are You Blogging Enough?

A question I’ve been asked a few times of late: “Do I need to blog? and if so how often should I post?”

My thoughts are if you have a website it is a good idea to blog. Before I go much further I want to take a time out and explain what a “blog” is.

A blog is actually an abbreviation for “Web Log”. An easy way to understand what blogging is, is to think of it as journaling. It’s a post or serious of posts about your what ever your hearts desire. I’ve seen blogs on hundreds of topics. Topics like becoming a parent; becoming a dad; becoming a mom; being a grandparent; there are food blogs, help blogs; blogs on training fitness; woodworking; you name it you can probably find a blog on it.

That brings me around to why you should be blogging and are you blogging enough?

If you like writing then blogging maybe for you. It’s a good way to become an expert on your topic and there are various ways to monetize a blog if you so choose but that is another discussion. (Just ask if you are curious about that.)

Returning back to my thought above, “if you have a website it is good to have a blog.” Many business and website owners these days are using blog software (WordPress) to build their site on and some people are under the impression that if they build their site on the WordPress platform they don’t need to blog and in my humble opinion that’s not exactly true.

While having a site built on that platform does help you in search engine listings for the most part (provided you have it set up correctly – again ask if you have questions.) I still think it is a good idea to set up a blog on the site as well.

And here is why I think that, it tells the the search engines that you are an active business and have fresh content on your site. It adds additional relative content to the site and it gives the customer/end user more information about your product or service. Plus it keeps the visitor on your site longer which gives you more leverage of promoting what you are offering.

In addition search engines monitor visitors length of visit. If they see the visitor was there a while it means your site was relevant for what they were searching for which in turn creates better ranking for you.

The final question which is where we actually started, Are you blogging enough? In most cases I would have to say that answer is NO! Many blogs I have seen there may be only two posts on a blog that’s a few years old some I see maybe two posts a year. Ideally, I would think two posts a MONTH is the bare minimum. Now that is just my humble opinion, and with that being said there are times where I get SO busy that I do in fact forget to blog. In general I’d actually like to get at least two blog posts a week.

There are so many things to blog about for your business. Think about special offers, new product lines, maybe even your policies on doing business, business beliefs, Ideas for new product lines, tutorials on how people could use your products, problems your product helps the visitor solve. Maybe even tips that some one that buys products could use even if it isn’t related to your product.

Blogging about these kinds of things helps build a relationship with your you customer or potential customer. They will want to come back and see what you’ve posted next and in the process they may find out they do in fact need your product or service.

These are just my thoughts, as always I appreciate your opinion and comments even if they differ from mine. Feel free to post your comments in the space provided below.

About Frank Deardurff

My Passion is my Faith, Family, Love for Music, Art and Photography. I myself have delivered many of my own training courses as well as webinars and teleseminars for many other coaching groups. I’ve also published a book titled “50 Biggest Website Mistakes”. Having many decades of experience in various forms of graphics and IT experience and aspects of online business, my vision is to help others overcome their fears and frustration with taking their businesses online and reach the next level of success.

6 Comments

  1. Jeanette Cates on February 6, 2015 at 2:50 pm

    Good points, Frank. I’d love to see you do a series on blogging – what to put in your blog posts, how to monetize your blog, the things people forget to do to get good SEO on their blog posts, etc

    Can’t wait!

    • Frank Deardurff III on February 7, 2015 at 1:15 am

      Thanks Janette for your feedback – hmm a blog series on blogs! Interesting…

  2. Cathy Goodwin on February 6, 2015 at 3:45 pm

    Definitely it’s crazy to have a blog with old posts gathering dust. It’s worse than no blog at all.

    Beyond that, I’d say tailor your number of posts to your strategy. Someone who’s got a following and who’s known in the industry would do well to publish often, even with shorter posts – 2-3x/week or more. Whatever you publish will get read. This strategy lets you promote many things so different segments of your audience will buy, depending on the post.

    But if you don’t have a following, you’ll be the tree falling in the empty forest. In that case, it’s better to write fewer posts (2x/month) but make them longer and more substantial. Then you promote these posts all over the place and gain credibility. You could even buy traffic.

    You also channel your writing energy into guest posts, videos and other content that will be seen by people who don’t know you. That’s another reason to write longer (600+ words), more knock-your-socks-off posts: if you want to guest-blog you have to show off what you’ve got!

    Hmm … I might have a blog post here!

    Either way, I can’t imagine doing this without WordPress, as you said.

    • Frank Deardurff III on February 7, 2015 at 1:16 am

      Thanks Cathy for adding your thoughts – sounds like we’re on a similar path here. Thanks so much for sharing.

  3. Meg Luce on February 11, 2015 at 1:01 pm

    Hi Frank,
    I have a self-created website with Yahoo SiteBuilder. Can you tell a low-tech person how I go about adding a blog? Let me guess–hire someone?! Thanks for any suggestions.

    • Frank Deardurff III on February 12, 2015 at 5:24 pm

      Meg, Thanks for posting! I’ve not used Yahoo SiteBuilder but from what I can tell it no longer has a “blog” component. At one time you could attach your Yahoo Pulse to it but it looks like Pulse has gone away. Another option would be to create a WordPress.com blog and link to it from your SiteBuilder account.

      My PERSONAL suggestion would be to convert the site over to a self hosted WordPress site. The self hosted WordPress software can be downloaded for Free at WordPress.org but in saying that most website hosting accounts offer WordPress as a quick install from the hosting panel. There are many benefits from having a self hosted WordPress site as it gives you plenty of control of the site and the search engines love the WordPress format. There is plenty of training out there for using WordPress which I also offer. Actually I include a web hosting package with my Inner Circle membership.

      Let me know if you have other questions and I will do my best to answer them.

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