Marketing Talk - Blogging

• It Gives Users a Reason to Come Back
• If your website content never changes, visitors will read what they want to once and leave and probably never be back.  But if you’re writing  new content all the time, they have a reason to come back. And if your content is interesting, they may even become loyal readers (and fans).
• It Gives You a Reason to Create New Content
• Once you’ve established a blogging habit, you’ll want to keep doing it (the definition of a habit, after all).  If you don’t have a blog, adding new content is difficult and may involve redesigning your site.  Blogs are simple; they manage themselves.  All you have to do is to keep pouring content into them.
• Blogging Helps You Think and Improves Your Creativity
• By disciplining yourself to blog frequently, you are making yourself create new ideas, think new thoughts, and explain things in new ways.  Blogging will keep you out of mental ruts.  New ideas will emerge, and you may even find yourself changing or redefining your business model.
• Google Loves Activity
• Did you know that Google gets bored easily, and if it finds nothing new when it checks your site, it probably will stop checking?  But did you know that Google sees each new blog post as a separate page, and more pages and more content equals more attention from search engines?  Want to get found?  Write more stuff, and do it often!

I see too many blogs posts that are way too long.  Blog posts should be in the range of 100 to 200 words.  300 max.

Blog posts are not “articles”.  Articles are longer.  If you want to publish an article, put it on a separate page in your site and link to it from a short blog post, using the post as a way to introduce the article.  You can make the article any length you want.

The problem is that people have short attention spans, especially when reading blogs.

The other common issue with blogging is frequency.  Posting every 3 or 4 weeks is completely ineffective.  You’ll never develop a loyal readership by doing that.

I suggest that you post at least once a week, and once a day is ideal.  Sound too difficult and time-consuming?  Remember, your posts are going to be short.  A really good idea is to write all your posts for the week at one time, then schedule them to be automatically published on specified days.  This makes the job a lot easier.

Oh, I forgot the “sweet” part.  Make your posts interesting.  You must provide value (useful information) to your readers.

Summary — your blog posts should be:
•    Short (100 to 300 words)
•    Sweet (interesting and useful)
•    Frequent (ideally, every day)

(By the way, this post has 216 words)

I recently found a website that had a blog.  But I didn’t know that at first.  Because “Blog” was not a menu item.  Well, it was, but it was a second-level menu item, buried at the bottom of a number of other items.  The parent menu item was “Tools”.   So I guess I found the blog only because I was curious about what “Tools” meant.

Your blog should be front and center, on your Home page or accessible via a main menu link. 

It’s the most important single part of your website. 

It’s the part that establishes your credibility as someone who knows what they’re talking about. 

It’s the part that brings people back to read more. 

It’s the place where you can let people know your latest thoughts and opinions. 

It’s the place where they can find interesting and useful information. 

It’s the place where you can develop relationships.

Don’t hide your blog.