Blogging is great. We're all on here blogging away and I'm sure most of us actually enjoy it. It can be time consuming sometimes and often we may lack inspiration but blogging is very important for your business. Here are the top 10 reasons why you should start blogging (hello to the lurkers) or continue to blog (hello all AR bloggers).
1. Search engines love blogs. If you've got something to say and you want it out there then blogging is the quickest and most effective way of communicating it. Search engines are hungry for the freshest content and they'll generally spider posts within minutes of you clicking the submit button. Why does Google own Blogger? Fresh content. So blogging gets your content spidered quickly and appearing in the search results within minutes.
2. The personal touch. I've lost count of how many websites and blogs are out there now. There must be billions. The majority of websites these days are faceless and uninspiring. A blog is a creative way to inject your personality and enthusiasm into your business online. Your customers will appreciate getting to know.
3. Blogging builds your brand. It allows you to express your own ideas and views within your industry and get people to recognise your business through your voice. Your customers can build a community around your brand based on your blog.
4. Blogs generate buzz. Bloggers are an insestuous bnuch. The "blogosphere" is where bloggers link to each other's blogs and a community of bloggers starts growing. AR is a great example of this. Buzz starts building on the hottest of topics and the buzz created can often spread very quickly.
5. Increase your website's link popularity. I don't see it enough but using your blog to link to your main website is a great way to increase the backlinks to your website and hence improve it's ranking in the seach engines. Any opportunity to link to your own website from within a post should be done to help your site along.
6. It's FREE publicity. It's not often you get something for nothing. But blogging is pretty much that. Free publicity for your business. All you have to do is invest a little time in putting words down, ideally once a day, and your messages will begin to propogate around the Internet. Done properly blogs are a hugely effective way to promote yourself and your business.
7. It's easy. Blogging is easy. As long as you can type on a keyboard then you can blog. You don't need to build your own websites, you don't have any hosting costs of hassles, etc, etc. It's all done for you. Just type away.
8. Traffic for the taking. The two most important factors in online marketing are traffic and conversions. Blogging on a platform such as AR gives you access to instant traffic, and lots of it. It builds relationships and customers. Blog away and tap into this existing traffic.
9. Blogging builds trust and authority. Bloggers expose themselves every time they post. What they say gets read by other bloggers and visitors and gets sent out across the Internet. This level of exposure helps you to build trust in you and your business and pitches you as an authority in your niche. It's brilliant for making you and your business stand out from the crowd.
10. It's fun! Let's face it, blogging is fun. With such a great community such as we have here at AR blogging is not a chore but something fun to do to break up the day! It just so happens that it's also highly beneficial (and essential) for your business.
Next time I'm going to tell you about a few tricks that you can use to get more traffic to your AR blog...
Until next time
Justin
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