Blogging can be a fantastic way to get more traffic charging full speed to your website.
The good news is that setting up a Blog for your website is surprisingly easy but there are a few caveats and things you need to change to ensure your blog is setup correctly to get maximum exposure in the search engines.
Before we start talking about what you should or shouldn't do with Blogs, let's take a step back and define what a Blog actually is.
A Blog can be thought of as a simple, public online diary where you can write entries (posts) into the diary.
Being public, the posts can be viewed by anyone who happens to surf by your site, and hopefully you have lots and lots of people reading every post you make, and contributing to your Blog in the form of adding comments, looking at relevant links you add to your blog, watching audio and video, and ingers crossed linking to your blog from their site, if they happen to have one.
What is particularly attractive about Blogs, is that the entire process of Blogging is very simple to do, mainly due to the great quality of Blog software available that you can install on your website.
Decent Blogging software provides all the functionality you need, the management of posts by yourself (and others), the categorization of posts (something that is essential) and even the process of telling other blogging websites every time you make a new post automatically.
Automatically telling other sites about your posts is a huge plus since it's getting known on the Internet, without the need for you to be having to manually "submit" your blog in order for people to find out about it.
Now in my opinion, one of the most important things to ensure is that you don't just use the Blog as a sales page (I recommend you leave the selling of your products and services to your actual sales page on your website).
Obviously you will want to talk about your products and services, and the benefits visitors will get in using them, but I believe it's important not to have an all out sales pitch, as that will tend to turn off visitors who may be seeing your message for the first time. I also recommend you talk about non-business stuff, information about you, the person, some of your interests, things you have found of interest on the Internet, etc.
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When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you, and form a relationship with a "real person" and not a nameless website, and this can only assist you in future sales with these people.
A Blog also allows (and in fact encourages) participation by visitors, who can post responses to your entries, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations. Good Blogging software will allow you to remove spam responses (where visitors or programs "write" messages directing people to their site) as well as to moderate conversations that are in appropriate or off-topic.One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank highly in the search engines. The search engines love Blogs, provided they are providing relevant and quality content.
To give you an idea of how important search engines see Blogs, Google bought one of the largest Blogging sites out there (blogger.com). Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you in your journey to find true search engine love.
If you have read any of the other articles on this website, you've probably gathered that I preach relevant useful content. Blogs are no different than other web traffic techniques, you need to ensure it's relevant, and ensure your separate your posts into logical categories.
For example if you have a website about software development, you may make posts discussing programming generally, other posts about training for software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.
It's vitally important that you don't jlump all posts together for several reasons. Firstly, people coming to your Blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training for example) and may find it hard and frustrating to easily find all posts you have written on training if you have not clearly defined categories (and allowed posts to be searched/sorted by these categories).
Likewise the search engines may view your Blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together, than another Blog that has posts clearly defined in categories. Search engines definately prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorise correctly with high search engine rankings.
The most popular open source blogging package is wordpress. Check that out online.
Wordpress is a free blogging package (yes nothing to pay!), and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power and flexibility. I use this package and can fully recommend you do as well.
Because of its popularity many Web host's have it available for installation on their websites for you with "one-click" installs.