Nothing to say… anatomy of a blog

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Often when discussing a new or revised website we find clients are mortified at the thought of having a blog on their website and will come out with any number of excuses not to. Obviously we don’t insist that anyone maintains a blog page, but there are a few good reasons why it should be considered. Let’s take a look at some of the protestations we hear:

“I hate blogs!”

    1. – just because you detest them, doesn’t mean that other people will not take the time to read yours.

“I don’t want to blog”

    1. – you don’t have to call it a “blog” and then it doesn’t sound quite so scary. It can be your latest news or special offers or, as in our case… musings.

“I have nothing to say”

    1. – actually, you’ll probably surprise yourself how much you have to say once you put your mind to it and be even more surprised about how many people may care about what you do say.

“I don’t have time for that”

    – it needn’t take a huge amount of your time. Nobody expects you to write a synopsis of “War and Peace” on your blog, so even a few paragraphs will suffice and may only take you five minutes.

So now we have the excuses out of the way, I can explain some of the advantages of having a blog.

a blog is a direct marketing opportunity

You can email previous customers to inform them of special offers by providing a direct link to the relevant page. Blogging gives you an opportunity to connect to your customers, keeping your website at the forefront of their awareness.

your blog helps bring new visitors to your website

Using social media such as Twitter or Facebook to let people know that you have added new content encourages visits to your site, so customers old and new are reminded of the relevance of your website and kept up to date with your latest products or special offers.

blogging is the easiest way to regularly update your website

Adding new pages and links between them encourages the search engine robots to revisit and index your site, promoting your page up the search engine rankings as they match relevant content to search queries.

So are you really sure you have nothing to say? I would hope that if you have a shiny new website you’d want to shout about it.