To Blog Or Not to Blog?

I'm Lorna Li, host of Entrepreneurs for a Change, and welcome back to another one of our video series about how to start a kickass website. Now the topic of the day is to blog or not to blog, that is the question. Now I understand that if you're a small business owner or a solopreneur that blogging might seem to be a lot of work. However, there are three powerful considerations to get into business blogging. The first one is blogging allows you to showcase your knowledge and expertise about your industry and that opens up a whole new pathway of becoming an industry influencer and a leader. The second consideration is blogging allows you to really build a connection with your audience and build a community around your business. The third consideration is blogging allows you to increase your search engine traffic and your rankings. Now, let me explain how the other two work. So clearly, if you're able to showcase your knowledge and expertise about your industry through your blog that allows you to really forge a pathway of being an industry thought leader, okay? You sharing your thoughts and opinions and experience about growing a business, for example, or your future outlook for your industry will allow you to connect with your audience in a way that is personable and allows them to engage dynamically through your blog. Because if you think about it, your business website tends to be confined to a few static pages; your homepage, your about page, your contact us page, maybe your press page, your products pages. There isn't a lot of room for growth. Whereas a blog allows you to continue to publish content, content that is relevant to you, your business, and your industry in a way that allows other people in your industry to connect with you. They can connect with you through your blog comments, for example. They can share your blog posts on Facebook and Twitter. So it really builds up a lot of engagement and builds a tribe around your company and your products and services. Now, how this effects search engine rankings and traffic. Well again, your growth and your online visibility may be limited by your static company pages, but with a blog you can produce or publish as many pages, as many new posts as you'd like. And so every post is a new webpage that gets put out there to the world and that is content that can be found by people searching online. So if you have a strategy to blog around topics that are important for your audience, like, for example, if you have a organic personal care product and people are searching for natural skin care or natural hair care and they're typing into Google Search questions related to the type of product that you offer, well if you have blog posts that incorporate the answers to your user's frequently asked questions then chances are you can be found more often online. So that's one way that you can really drive targeted search engine traffic to your website by providing answers to your customers questions or creating content around most common search engine queries that are related to your industry. Now another way that you can use your blog post to increase your search engine rankings is to link your blog post to your product pages. So by creating a internal linking structure that leverages your blog posts as new pages that you can link to your product pages using keyword relevant anchor text, that's another way that you can boost your search engine rankings because internal links are a factor. They're not a strong factor as inbound or external backlinks, but they do actually influence your ranking ability within search engines. So those are three powerful reasons to consider getting into business blogging.