Why Blog?

Blogging has become one of the primary ways of communicating ideas and interacting on the internet. There are literally millions of blogs online today on every conceivable subject. Blogs have several purposes:

• Provide fresh content on a topic.
• Give a forum for interaction on a subject.
• Get feedback on an idea, product or other subject.
• Link back to a main website to help boost search ranking for the main site
• All the above help to boost natural search engine ranking and increase your credibility as an authority within your niche or industry.
• Credibility and authority build trust.
• Trust builds customers and traffic to your online and bricks and mortar store or service center.

In other words, if you’re in business or just passionate about a given subject, you need to blog to be recognized online. Even big companies will enormously improve traffic to a website when they also maintain an authoritative, helpful blog. Customers will keep coming back because of the fresh content and the interaction they are invited to have with you through the blog comments capability.

Role of Social Media

There are a number of other social networking tools that are also critical to drawing attention to your product, service, organization or interest. There are a growing number of social interaction sites that let you create special content about your niche and, in a subtle and professional way, advertise your business. Some of the best of these are www.squidoo.com, www.hubpages.com, and www.ning.com. They have templated tools to allow you to build content quickly on a subject area and to link back to your main site or sites. Some of these tools share advertising revenue with you. They also improve your ranking the more you post.

Video sites are growing in importance. Of course, everyone knows about YouTube and its importance in telling the story visually of your products and services. An new all-video based social networking site is at Videngage. There is a marketplace included in Videngage where products and services can be sold using video as the medium.

There are new social network sites popping up daily. It would be counter-productive to be highly active at a lot of them, but by joining and then bookmarking your blog content, Squidoo lenses, and Ezine articles you can build links back to your sites and increase your search engine and human credibility without providing a lot of new content for each site.

One of the best explanations of the importance of blogging and social media to building online traffic for your business was produced recently by search engine optimization specialist, Charles Heflin. This short video should convince you, if you need to be convinced, that you need to add a family of interlinked sites in order to maximize exposure to your product:

http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=8TLpp&m=1flNCcaz4wufiv&b=9v77XnFvabjxd6CKfGTvsQ

Hope you enjoy his video.

Liz Nichols

www.myblogbuilders.com

319-356-6550