To Blog or Not to Blog – That is the Question

There are a number of people that have been asking me whether or not I think it is important to blog even if you already have a website. While I have gone back and forth on this myself, I have come to the final conclusion that yes, you need to blog. The reason, you can reach more people with a blog than you can with a website.

Think of your website as your store front, and your blog is your customer service department. While your website talks about all of the products or the services you have to offer, the blog is more to engage the customers. Blogs provide a way for you to share information, data and opinions between you, your team and your customers. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let’s go with a big name on the Internet, About.com.

About.com is a website/business that offers you information on just about anything you can think of. If you go to the homepage of About.com it is going to tell you about what they offer and how they can help you. Then on the side you are going to see a “topics” area. This is really a set of links to the various blogs that are associated with About.com. They are the customer service departments, if you are looking for help on an issue related to Green Living, you are going to click on that blog you aren’t going to send an email to About.com directly.

The bigger benefits of the blog include ease of use for the webmaster. In most cases you can send a blog post over your blackberry to post on the blog. This means if you are out and about and something happens that you think would be beneficial to your readers or customers you can type it up wherever you are and post it. If you are creating content for your website then you have to go to your home office, or get out the laptop… login as the administrator, upload and format the content to fit with the rest of the website. This is not to say that a website is not beneficial, it is actually a necessity when it comes to successful businesses, just as in years gone by you wouldn’t imagine trying to run a business without an ad in the yellow pages… now you must have a website.

Plus the blog allows you to use RSS feeds. So let’s say you have a Twitter account, you can link the blog to the Twitter account and once you post on the blog it automatically sends a link to Twitter and it is posted on your account. Twice the bang for the buck, so to speak, this is important because the Internet has become such a major component of our everyday life.

Just think for a minute about how much time you spend on the Internet every day. Whether you are checking email, getting the latest stock prices or the Bears football schedule and we can’t forget chatting on Facebook and MySpace. I find it hard to believe that there are many people out there that don’t spend at least an hour a day on the net. Which means you need to use every avenue you have available to you to reach your potential customers.

Use Video to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Do you have a great website, but aren’t getting any web traffic? Do you often wish you could build your site hits up, but you don’t know how? There are many ways to build an audience, but the easiest and most simple way to drive traffic to your website is to use video.

Think about this. How many people do you know who would rather read a book than watch television? Chances are, most of the people you know relax in front of the T.V. after putting in a hard day’s work. This is because reading takes more imagination, and thus it is more work. When people watch television, they don’t have to imagine the place the characters are in or what they look like, all of that information is displayed on the television monitor. That is also why people tend to remember stories better when they see moving images as opposed to reading about it.

It works the same way for web videos. Web videos will enhance your site, and help you get out the message you are trying to convey. And if you use a popular video sharing company such as YouTube or MetaCafe, you are opening your website to a very large market! There is no way your web traffic can’t go up!

These video sharing companies have “tags” which you can attach to your video. Tags are just one-word descriptions of the video you are uploading. For instance, if I were to make a video to accompany this article, I would use tags like website, traffic, enhance, video, stats, how, increase. When a user of the video sharing company does a search for what he wants to see, when he types in “how to increase my website traffic”, my video will appear in the search results! Keep in mind that the title of your video is just as important as the tags, so make the title something a person will search for.

There is also a description box that appears beside the video where the tags will appear. This is an excellent place to put a link to your site. Another technique is to include the website address in the video itself. This will make it easier for the viewer to remember it.

If you want proof that using video works, just go to a video sharing website and enter terms relevant to your site in the search box. If you see more than one video in the search results, and they have links to their websites, then you know that it works because other people are doing it!