Blogs: Use Them or Lose Them

by John Eberhard

I have written a number of articles about the benefits of blogs:

1. You write something and post to your blog regularly.
2. You have your blog set up so there are numerous links back to your main site in the sidebars. Plus you write your blog posts so that you link back to your main site within each post.
3. Every time you post something new on the blog, you go to a site called www.pingomatic.com, and use it to send out a notification (called a “ping”) to all the blog search engines like Technorati.com. This causes them to include your new blog post in their search engines right away.
4. The combination of posting regularly, i.e. once a week, plus pinging the blog search engines, drives significant traffic to your blog, which in turn drives traffic to your web site. I have two blogs for my marketing business and month to month the blogs routinely are the #1 or #2 driver of traffic to my web site, running neck and neck with Google.

So this is all nice and wonderful. But a major breakdown occurs here if you do not post something to the blog regularly. Ideally this is once a week or more. If you post something to the blog once a week or more, you will start to really drive traffic and you will develop fans who follow what you write.

Unfortunately I have set up blogs for some clients who have then posted one or two things on it and then forgotten the blog for months (you know who you are). This defeats the purpose of a blog and is really a waste of a valuable resource for driving traffic to a web site.

So here are some tips on generating content for that blog on a regular basis:

1. I find that in my work with clients, something that happens with a client over the course of each week will often be a good topic for a blog and newsletter article.
2. A blog post can be anything from a long article (300-700 words), to a short comment on something (100-200 words).
3. If you find a video on YouTube or somewhere else that would be of interest to readers of your blog, then post the video on your blog. On YouTube, to the right of the video you can find the HTML code. When you go to post to your blog, select HTML editing, then paste that code there, and the video player will appear right in your blog. If you want to post a comment about the video, type your comment in using the text editor, then switch over to the HTML editor and paste in the code from YouTube.
4. You can post links to interesting articles elsewhere on the web, that relate to your blog topic. However, I will say that I see some other people doing this, especially on Facebook and Twitter, but that’s all they ever do. My reaction is “Don’t you ever write any content yourself?” So this is good to do, but don’t make that the only thing you do.
5. You can do a Google search related to your topic and see what other items come up, or go to other web sites related to your topic, and get ideas for articles or shorter posts. You can also go to article directories like www.goarticles.com and search for articles related to your topic. But don’t steal an article or plagiarize it. Just use these for ideas.

Use these tips to write some new content for your blog regularly, at least once or twice a month, preferable once a week or more. The more often you post things to your (pinging each time), the more traffic you will drive to your blog and site.

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Comments

[Footwear Headhunter New York]

I needed this info thanks mate

Regards