Top 7 Reasons Why I Blog
There have been a lot of “Why I Blog” posts in the blogosphere lately. Many people have personal reasons why they do or don’t blog regularly. Those reasons might keep you going, but there are also some compelling business reasons why you should maintain a current blog. Here are my top seven reasons why a blog is one of the best medias to present your site content on.
1. People come back for the fresh content.
If there’s something new to see every day, people have a reason to return to your site. If you can keep people coming back, that does a lot of good things for your business: they’ll see you as more of an expert; they’re more likely to buy from a trusted source; they’ll link to your site and help your rankings.
2. People can post comments and feel involved.
People are more interested in things they feel they have a hand in. When people post comments on your blog, they have a small amount of ownership. A good blog is like a conversation between yourself and your readers. They’ll keep coming back to add their thoughts on your post, respond to others’ comments, and see others’ responses to theirs.
3. Build in social bookmarking icons on each post.
Social networking is a powerful advertising tool and there are lots of blog plugins that place one icon links at the bottom of your blog posts that people can use to promote your blog. If people like your blog they add it to social sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Linkroll, reddit, StumbleUpon, and Furl. This will bring your site exposure to many different people who may never have found it otherwise. It can generate click-through traffic, attention, and hopefully new clients and customers.
4. Submit to blog directories and get click though traffic, ranking juice, & Pagerank vote.
You can submit your blog to blog directories such as Blogarama, All-Blogs.net, BoingBoing, FeedsFarm, Diarist, and more. These give you the same benefits you’d get from submitting your site URL to a conventional directory: ranking juice, and a boost in PageRank. But they’re also more heavily searched by users, and you may get some click-through traffic as well. There are hundreds of blog directories out there; Lee Odden has a Blog List going at his Online Marketing Blog.
5. Placing inbound RSS feeds on your blog produces content.
You can use RSS feeds to place content from other sites on your web site. This is a great way to show your readers news and related info from all over the web, plus generate more content for the search engines to crawl. Remember content (that wins your lots of links) is king.
6. Syndicated RSS feeds will get you inbound links from the sites they are placed on.
Blog software creates RSS feeds for you blog and categories. You can submit your RSS feed URL to RSS directories and syndicators. When other people place your RSS feed on their sites, you get links on their sites pointing back to yours for every post in the RSS feed. It’s a great way to enhance your link-building campaign.
7. RSS subscription icons make it easy to subscribe to your blog.
You can put a set of subscription icons on your blog so that people can subscribe to your blog or a category of your blog with a single click. Wordpress has a Plugin feature that installs subscription icons for a wide variety of RSS aggregators. You can set up the icons in your sidebar automatically, move them manually to other spots on your blog, and turn off certain icons you don’t want. It makes it quick and easy for readers to subscribe to your blog.
A blog is a great way to attract return traffic, raise customer loyalty and brand awareness, promote yourself as an industry expert, get links, raise your PageRank, and improve your rankings in the SERPs. With all the reasons why you should blog, it’s tough to understand why there are only 175,000 new blogs a day : )