A blog brings many benefits to a website. These include:
- Your Blog is purely focused on your business.
- Each Blog post is a separate page on your website.
- Each Blog post is automatically archived by date and subject ‘tag’.
- Each Blog post has a comments option to allow visitor interaction.
- Each Blog post can be shared on social networks automatically.
Your Blog is purely focused on your business.
A Blog is different to writing content for a standard web page, the general rule of talking about features and benefits of your business to the customer does not apply.
Instead, your blog can focus on different aspects of your industry. This way, your blog builds up to create a library of news, updates, and answers to common queries.
Each Blog post is a separate page on your website.
This library of content is automatically created as separate pages with unique titles and content. Most business websites average 25 – 50 pages of content, a simple Blog can contain hundreds of pages all linking back to your standard website pages, all containing unique and relevant content.
Each blog post is automatically archived by date and subject ‘tag’. Blogs not only allow you to post content easily they also archive your posts based on information such as the date of creation and ‘tags’ that you assign to identify topics covered in each post.
This archive allows visitors to view newer, older or related posts with ease. Most importantly this is automatic so no effort is required to maintain this archive resource.
Each Blog post has a comments option to allow visitor interaction. Another great feature of Blogs is comments.
Comments allow visitors to ask for clarification, give their own personal input on a post and show their appreciation if they found the content useful. This interaction with visitors or potential customers can be very powerful as all the visitor needs to do to comment on your Blog.
Blogs use a simple but powerful technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) at their core – this technology allows visitors or social network pages to ‘subscribe’ to your Blog. Each time you post a new article these subscribers receive a notification or in the case of social networks the post appears in your timeline/feed.
A Blog can be used as a central point to create content and the Blog system will distribute the posts to relevant parties automatically. To recap a Blog is a great way of:
- Creating new site pages with little effort.
- Creating a knowledge base or news area that is automatically archived.
- Interacting with your visitors and ultimately collecting their contact details.
- Sharing your industry knowledge with subscribers in a proactive way.
It’s also worth noting that you can have more than one writer on your website Blog, sales could post new product releases, and technical support could post the most common support questions and answers.
The best way to think of a Blog is a website within a website, the Blog creates, organises, archives and shares site content.
A final thought when considering whether you should add a Blog to your site is that search engines love Blogs, companies that post regularly to their Blog receive on average 55% more site traffic and 77% more leads than those that don’t!