You’re throwing opportunities away. According to Digital Inspiration, Blogs rate higher on Google than Newspapers or Magazines. Why do you think most major news services have added blogs to their sites? They’re trying not to lose their audiences. Blogs capture web traffic. In fact, one acronym for BLOG is Better Listing On Google! Remember, most people don’t search by company name, unless they’re already your clients. You want to capture people looking at real estate issues, or whatever else your site is about.
It can be hard to believe, at first, that it helps. Someone asked, recently, “You mean people read blogs and then call you?” Yes, that’s one way. Blogs help search engines find and rank your site higher. You get high plusses for unique, original, relevant, and frequently updated content. People whose sites never change, start sinking in the rankings of key searches. You will come up in more searches (it’s not just about rankings), which means more people find your site when searching for relevant information and discussion. Eventually, a readership develops. If you rarely update your blog, of course, you’ll never experience these benefits. It’s like owning a neon sign and never turning on the power. It’s hard for people of my generation to believe that things work this way now, but they do. That’s why most major companies and organizations have turned to blogging, and often run a number of blogs that draw attention to their services.
I’m not technical!: Neither is blogging. Blogging is no harder. and not very different, than sending an e-mail. It’s type and save. For many people, blogging has not been tried and found too hard, it’s simply not been tried, because there’s not enough belief in increasing your business. But if that’s not you, it takes about 10 minutes a day for a consistent time to make an impact. What are you waiting for?
The Keys to Blogging Well are:
Consistency: Blog 10-minutes a day. If you absolutely can’t, then blog every other day. If every 3rd day is all you can do, it’s all you can do. But putting up a blog you intent to update once a month is just going to frustrate visitors who expect to see something new from you.
Relevancy: It’s all well and good to blog about your cats. But relevancy scores big with search engines and with clients. Blog about the local market, your industry, financial issues, advice for buyers/sellers/borrowers/homeowners. Blog what you think about, what you know, what’s on your mind and, if you do that consistently, you’ll attract other people who are thinking about it too.
Uniqueness: Don’t copy and paste other people’s content into your blog. For one thing, that’s stealing, and other businesses tend to take a dim view. For another, search engines penalize you for duplicate content, so you’re just wasting space and making it worse. You don’t have to be hemingway to write a paragraph on what’s frustrating about the market right now, or answering a question that you were asked today, or explaining why a certain kind of mortgage is better than another, or discussing whether it’s a good time to buy, a good time to sell, or both. Maybe you write just to give hope. But for goodness sake, if you can answer a question on the telephone, you can write down what you said on your blog. Work it!
That’s it. You can google search business blogs, blog growth, blogs and search engine rankings, and any number of other phrases to see what’s going on. It’s like health – it’s not about whether we know what’s good for us; it’s whether we have the will. In fact, this is about the health of your business.
